


Monsters

by notmanos



Category: Supernatural
Genre: don't do meth kids, don't get eaten dumbass, headless bodies shouldn't be walking around
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-06-23 14:38:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 44,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15608460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notmanos/pseuds/notmanos
Summary: (Season 10) Jody calls the boys in when she gets the odd case of headless corpses supposedly walking around and somehow eating people. But it's the tip of the iceberg for strangeness, which couldn't come at a worse time, as Dean is slowly but surely losing his battle against the Mark of Cain.





	1. The Hope That House Built

**Author's Note:**

> How have I never written a Jody story? Well, here it is.

Jody knew immediately it was going to be one of those days. 

“I’m telling you there were headless guys eating them,” their one witness said. The fact that he was clearly high as hell on some kind of bathtub meth made him twitch and fidget like he was under assault by a swarm of invisible wasps. Now, she knew the supernatural existed, but she’d missed out on the section about invisible insects. 

What a mess. She actually did hope it was some monster or something, so she could pretend those really awful drugs hadn’t finally traveled to Sioux Falls. 

There were two bodies in the abandoned house these three kids - well, men in their early to mid twenties - had been squatting in, and by the looks of it, doing drugs that ranged from the delightfully antiquated huffing paint, to the more modern drugs that smelled like a chemical fire in high school science room. The fact that two of the men clearly had bites taken out of them, which had probably led to their deaths, reminded her of that hideous story out of Florida about the man who was high out of his mind on some new meth variation, and eating another man’s face off. Nothing supernatural there; just pure misery. Who needed monsters when humans were happy enough to rip others to pieces for little to no reason?

Their witness was also their only suspect at this point, but even Jody had to admit, that was kind of shaky. Whatever took bites out of the two men had good sets of teeth, and this man - who identified himself as “Hazy J” - had meth teeth. Meaning more than half were missing, and the ones left behind were in sad shape. She bet he’d lose most of them if he bit into a hot dog. But take big chunks out of a human? No fucking way. He’d have been spitting ivory. 

Officer Kaset was taking the man’s statement, and doing his best not to smirk. “How could headless guys chomp on them?”

“Yeah, I know, right?” Hazy J replied. “I didn’t really understand it at first either. But they had ... things in their chest.”

“Things? What kind of things?”

He made vague hand gestures that Jody thought were a signal to the pitcher that someone was trying to steal home, and then shrugged with his hands wide apart. “I dunno. Somethin’. I couldn’t see it real clear from where I was.”

“Where were you?” Kaset asked.

Hazy J pointed towards a corner where there was a stack of garbage, as well as a sleeping bag that had probably seen better years. Jody wandered over, to see how much of the bodies of the two men she could see from there. It was an odd angle, and when she crouched down, she found the garbage pile did block her view a little. It was possible that the man or men who did this didn’t see Hazy J either. But it all begged the question, who would do this and why? And there were the bites out of the men. They looked human, or at least humanish, but still ...

She really didn’t want to call the Winchesters. She had a loose email chain with Sam, and the last one she got from him, he sounded very depressed. Jody didn’t know much about the whole Mark of Cain thing, but from what little she was let in on, Dean had all but given up on trying to get rid of it, and more or less resigned himself to his fate. Which was what exactly? Well, he was a demon for a little while, and maybe it was that. Or something worse. It felt like death, and it made her cringe to think about it. It was also weird for Dean to give up, as he seemed like the type who never did, but everybody had a breaking point. Dean was only human .... wasn’t he? Or did the Mark make him kind of not anymore? She didn’t know. She felt bad for them both, but she felt a bit more bad for Sam, who seemed stressed and desperate. Not that Dean sounded like he was doing all that great himself. Would they be the Winchesters if they weren’t tormented in some fashion?

Her radio crackled, and Lavinia at dispatch said, “Sheriff, do you copy?”

“I copy,” she replied, turning and walking back to the front door. 

“Uh, Harris from the M.E.’s office just called in. He said there was a report by several people of two headless bodies by Canton Creek, just a couple miles from your location.”

“West side or South side?” she asked, quickly getting into her truck. Headless bodies? Too much of a coincidence. 

“West. Near O’Bannon’s.”

“Got it.” She hadn’t even finished replying before she was on the road. Kaset and Moore had the scene, and Hazy J might have been twitchy, but he didn’t seem violent. Besides, the day two cops couldn’t handle a tweaked out suspect was the day those cops should retire.

It didn’t take her long to get there, as traffic was pretty light at this time in the morning, and she saw the meat wagon pulled off on the side of the road. She didn’t recognizes the man, but the woman was Shah, a woman who had been at other death scenes before. Fun job. 

Anila Shah was fairly young, early thirties at best, and very pretty, probably a little too pretty for this town, as she had joked at the Christmas party. But was it a joke if it was honestly true? Dark hair, big dark eyes, dark skin, and what Jody appreciated the most about her, a no-nonsense work ethic. You didn’t have to ask if she got squeamish. She wasn’t the type. She handled everything with a sangfroid her male colleagues tried and failed to copy. 

Shah approached her truck, and as Jody got out, she said, “Pranking us is a crime, right?”

That was a good question. “Maybe, Why?”

Shah gestured to her male partner, who was talking to a woman in what looked like jogging clothes, an earbud still nestled in one of her ears. As Jody approached, she heard her side of the story. ”- crazy, but I swear I saw the two headless bodies get up and walk away. Could they have been, I dunno, two colleges kids doing a prank or something?”

Well, unless soccer mom here was huffing the same stuff as Hazy J, something weird was going on. 

Goddamn it, she was going to have to call the Winchesters after all.

**

The Mark of Cain seemed like an endless catch 22. Funny Cain didn’t bother to mention that.

Dean was finding it harder and harder to sleep. Oh, physically he could do it, but then he was treated to hellacious nightmares, ones worse than he’d had when he was a kid. It didn’t help that he could feel the Mark in the back of his mind like a drum beat, urging him to  _ go, do, kill _ . Drinking himself into a near coma didn’t help. Taking over the counter sleep meds - and stuff that totally wasn’t over the counter sleep meds - didn’t help. The Mark could counter anything he put in his system, which was a total fucking bummer. 

But staying up didn’t help either. Cas was pretty adamant he stick to his human routines as much as possible, and Dean didn’t know why. Except, no, that wasn’t true. He could stay up all night and be fine. Except that voice in the back of his head was a little louder now, the impulses sharper and more insistent. The Mark took a bigger foothold in him somehow. 

He’d tried to sleep, but after a few hours, he woke himself up screaming, and decided he was done. He took a long shower, where he tried to tell himself he was all right, he could get through another day of fighting this dark tide in him ... but holy fuck, he wanted to stop. The temptation to just stop fighting and let it wash him away was so tempting. He’d been fighting all his life, one thing or another. Couldn’t he rest now? Even just for one day? 

No. Because he knew what would happen, what he’d become. And even if it was inevitable, Dean could carve out one more day when the Mark on his arm didn’t completely beat him. 

But god, was he tired. Maybe not even physically. Soul weary. 

The bunker had a gym. Actually, it had several, but some of the equipment was so old and weird, Dean had no idea what the hell they were supposed to be. He preferred the one that looked like an old boxing gym, because he could recognize that equipment, but it was dangerous.

  
Case in point. He was restless and needed to burn off some energy, so he decided to work the heavy bag for a bit. Big mistake, one he should have seen coming. Dean was throwing body blows, nothing too heavy, getting a nice rhythm of rights and lefts going. It was almost autonomic, so he could switch off his brain for a little while and just be a machine. It was a mini-vacation of sorts.

Except this noise brought him back. It was a sort of creaking noise, one he hadn’t heard before, and he stopped and settled the bag until he figured it out. 

His right arm was burning, except ... no, not the entire arm, like he’d pulled a muscle or something. Only the Mark, nearly incandescent with fury. It was then that Dean realized he’d been putting a lot more strength into the hits than he had intended. 

The creaking was the chain. He was starting to break it. 

Which was beyond crazy. Cas could do that, sure, but he was an angel. This chain could take a stupid amount of punishment. He shouldn’t have been able to damage it.

But Dean saw it. He saw the deformed link - sorry, links - and knew the Mark had been helping him take out some aggression. Good thing he wasn’t sparring with a partner. He’d have killed them.

Shit shit shit. Dean would have killed himself if he thought it would have done any good, but he already knew that made things ten thousand times worse. He couldn’t really die, only come back in an even worse form. 

So. What did that leave exactly? Find another sucker to give this curse to? Even if he could find someone, he wouldn’t. This was too dangerous. 

In the back of his mind, he could hear his Dad asking, “ _ What now, genius?”  _ He hated that, because whenever he heard it, it reminded him of all his fuck ups. From childhood on, a nearly unbroken line of fuck ups. He’d done some good for the world, but he was fairly certainly it didn’t outweigh the bad he’d done. 

Oh, he needed to stop thinking. He needed to stop fighting. He needed to stop. Too bad he couldn’t.

By the time Dean got out of his second super long shower, Sam was up. Dean went to the kitchen and got some coffee, and hoped Sam wouldn’t give him that look again. That concerned, pitying look. He didn’t want it, he didn’t need it, and he was afraid it would set off a sense of irritation that the Mark always confused for anger. He needed to hold it together.

Luckily, by the time he joined him at the main table, Sam was looking at his laptop. “Get any sleep at all?” he asked, without looking up.

Which had Sam heard - the screaming, or him almost beating their one ton heavy bag right into the ground? The gym was way too far away from his room, and the noise of the chain starting to give way had not been that loud. “A little,” Dean said. Not technically a lie. He’d gotten a couple hours. “Found something interesting?”

“Not yet. Looks like a lot of maybes.” Sam had many alerts set up with just about every legitimate news service you could think of. Then it was just a matter of sifting through them to find the monster cases. It worked, but it could take a while. 

It occurred to Dean he hadn’t had breakfast, and he wasn’t hungry. That was a horrible sign, and pretty much never happened. He got up to go get something, when Sam’s phone rang. Sam looked at the screen to see who was calling, then answered it and put it on speaker. “Hey Jody.”

“Hey Sam, Dean. Sorry to bother you guys, but I have something that might be a case. Or a really bad joke that got out of hand. Take your pick.”

He and Sam shared a look. Jody was not the kind to panic or call in if there was something she could handle. This had to be something serious. “Hey Jody,” Sam replied. “What’s up?”

“Well, we got a report of a double homicide this morning, and the one witness - who admittedly, is high off his tits - claimed they were killed by headless corpses that partially ate the dead men.”

Dean had to suppress a smile at the phrase “high off his tits”. Jody was the best. “How does that make any sense? How does a headless corpse eat anyone?”

“We’re on the same page. I was ready to write it off as some weird drug induced hallucination, except a couple of miles away, there were reports of two headless corpses that seemingly got up and walked away, according to a different, very sober witness.”

“Um,” Sam said, jumping back on his laptop. “Have you found any of them?”

“Headless corpses? Not yet. I’ve asked my officers to keep their eyes open, but I can’t really say keep a look out for headless corpses walking around without being checked for mental competency and drug abuse.”

Sam frowned at whatever he was looking at on his laptop. Alive but headless as a search probably didn’t bring up a lot, besides the movie Reanimator. “I get you.”

“This couldn’t be zombies again, could it?” she asked. Considering her negative personal history with zombies, that wasn’t a surprise.

“As far as I know, removing a zombie’s head kills the zombie,” Dean told her. “I’ve never heard of one that walked it off.”

“Yeah, I thought so, but I had to ask.”

“I’ll be there soon, Jody. Thanks.” Sam said, hanging up. 

Only when he had, did Dean say, “I’m not benched for this one.”

“Dean-”

“If I stay here I will go crazy, and that isn’t hyperbole. I have to get out of here.” 

Sam stared at him, as if judging his veracity. “Dean, what if-”

“I am in control. I’ve got this.” He wasn’t lying. He was in control. For how much longer he had no idea, which is why he wanted to go now. 

This might also be his last chance to see Jody before whatever happened to him happened. Not that he was going to tell Sam that, because he might lock him in one of the dungeon rooms and go. 

But as the pulse of heat from the Mark reminded him, he could probably break down the door if he wanted to. And he really didn’t want to. Because he knew the moment he gave into that, the Mark took over and he was gone. 

Dean didn’t know how much time he had left. Might as well make the best of it while he could. 

 


	2. Beastland

Dean was acting like he was personally fine and nothing was wrong. Which told Sam something was very wrong. 

Did Dean really think he was going to buy it? It was almost insulting. Except, the more Sam thought about it, the more he realized the act he was putting on might be more for himself. Dean wanted to pretend to be normal, because he honestly wanted to believe it. And maybe if he pretended hard enough, it would be true. That was very sad. 

He needed to save him. He was trying. But Sam knew things were getting desperate now. If he had any chips to call in, he had to do it soon. He didn’t know how much longer Dean could last. 

  
Sam tried to keep his mind off of it with research, but it was difficult to focus, especially when he had to sift through so much stuff. But he finally found something. “Hey, I found it.”

Dean didn’t even look over from the driver’s seat. “What? A headless monster that eats people?”

“Yes.”

“If you say the Headless Horseman, I’m shoving you out of the car.”

“No, it’s called an akephaloi. They date back to ancient Greece apparently, or at least the legend of them did.”

Dean at least waited until they were at a stoplight to look at him. “How do they eat people or walk around with no head?”

“Well, they do have eyes and a mouth on their chest. Presumably that’s where the brain is as well.”

Dean glared at him. “You’re making this up.”

“I swear I’m not. The Men of Letters have a page devoted to them. If they did exist - and there’s some doubt about that - it was believed they’d gone extinct. But they were known to be cannibals who appeared headless, but in fact have their relevant facial features where their chests should be.”

Dean thought about this, to the point of missing the light when it turned green. But there was no one behind them, so it didn’t matter that much. “Is there a picture?” 

“Uh, yeah. But they’re only drawings from ancient texts.” Sam highlighted one of the pictures, and turned the screen towards Dean. It was kind of ridiculous - basically a cartoon of a broad chested man with eyes where his nipples should be, and a mouth where his belly button should be, and absolutely nothing existing above the shoulders. It was equally laugh inducing and terrifying.

He expected Dean to laugh, but he just stared at it a moment before shaking his head. “No way in hell is that a real thing.”

Sam turned his laptop back towards him. “I’m inclined to agree with you, except ... there were quite a few stories over the centuries about them, in different places. I mean, they’re completely ridiculous ... but they may actually be a thing.”

“So, if these fucking ugly things do exist, how do we kill them?”

“Umm ...” Sam scanned the page from the Men of Letters archive, hoping he’d find it. “There’s no first hand accounts.”

Dean sighed. “Of course there isn’t.”

“But the guess was you had to destroy the brain.”

“The brain? Which is where? Their ass?”

“Maybe? I don’t think anyone’s ever autopsied one.”

Dean was still shaking his head. “Okay, say this is what Jody’s dealing with. First, how did they go from being extinct to being in South Dakota? And two, how come only two people have seen these walking jokes so far?”

Sam shrugged. There were some things you just couldn’t research. “I don’t know.”

“Sometimes this job just sucks.”

Coming from him, right this moment? Sam had to suppress the urge to laugh, mainly because he felt it’d become crying and screaming at the end. Sucked wasn’t a strong enough word. Not by a damn sight.

**

Dean was trying really hard to take this seriously. Headless dudes with torso mouths eating people. Okay. Looking like some kind of motherfucking rejected hallucination creature from Naked Lunch or Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. Sure, they existed, why not? Even people who were about to get cannibalized to death needed a good laugh. 

If this thing was what they were hunting - huge if - Dean imagined they’d need chainsaws, go full Evil Dead on these cartoon monsters. Because if they had brains in their torsos or asses, wherever - hell, maybe it was in their feet - cutting through an entire body was far from easy. Even using a good machete to take a head off a body took more strength and follow through than you realized. An entire body had muscles, tendons, and several more sizable bones, not to mention fat. You couldn’t do that with a machete, not in one hit. A chainsaw was ideal, if messy. Otherwise, you were devoting time and effort into dismembering something and  _ why the hell was he thinking of this while the Mark was just waiting for its opening _ ? 

Dean gripped the steering wheel hard enough that his knuckles went white, and he stopped thinking about it. One step at a time. For now, he was going to pretend that was an interesting factoid Sam had dug up from the archives and nothing else. It wasn’t the thing they were hunting. They had no idea what that was yet. 

And honestly, gory brain images aside, he really hoped they weren’t after such goofy looking things. Sure, they hunted monsters and could be said to live in a basement, but couldn’t they have just a little bit of dignity? Dean realized he should be the last person thinking such a thing. He thought it anyway.

Jody agreed to meet them at the cop shop, so they were in their FBI drag, ready to pretend to be feds for her officers. Who probably wondered why they were the only feds who came around these parts, but Dean imagined Jody probably had a good excuse. She kept her troops in line.

They flashed their fake badges, and Jody appeared, waving them back to her office. Dean flashed his best smile at the woman working the front desk, but she didn’t even seem to notice. Damn. He was losing his charm. That was a terrible omen.

Once they were safely in the privacy of her office, they shared welcoming hugs, and got down to business. It was a little early for coroner photos, but Jody had taken pictures of the wounds suffered by the dead men on her phone, and showed them to him and Sam.

They were as gruesome as Dean expected. Something with a fairly sizable mouth ripped hunks out of these men, like they were the world’s best sandwiches. And the bite force was intense. Dean saw splintered bones, and not just the thinner bones of the ribcage. One man’s arm had been bitten off above the elbow, and that bone ended in slivers. 

Could one of those goofy chest face motherfuckers have done that? Dean had doubts.

“This almost looks like a werewolf attack,” Sam said, grimacing at the grisly pictures. “Were-”

“Hearts were intact,” Jody said, guessing his question. “In fact, the only organ missing from both men were lungs.”

That made Sam sit up a little straighter. Dean knew his body language by now, and that meant he hadn’t expected that at all. It was a normal person’s equivalent of a shocked gasp. “Lungs?”

Jody, seated behind her surprisingly neat desk, shrugged and shook her head. Except, why was Dean surprised it was neat? Of course it would be. He couldn’t help but notice she had a picture of Alex on her desk as well. “Yeah, the lungs were mostly consumed on both of them. No idea why.”

Sam looked at the pictures again, frowning in concentration. While he did, Dean admitted, “There’s not many monsters who go for that. I can’t actually think of any off the top of my head.”

“I couldn’t either, but I’m not the expert,” Jody said. 

“So what’s the whole story?” Dean wondered. “Two stoned guys get attacked at a house, and their buddy is left behind unhurt?”

“Stoned is too mild a word,” Jody said. “They were meth heads.”

Now it was Dean’s turn to be surprised. “Oh, who has low enough standards to eat a meth head?” He looked at Sam. “Could it be ghouls who decided they wanted fresh but chemically degraded meat?”

Sam shot him a look best described as his  _ knock it off, Dean _ glance. Again, they could communicate most of the time with looks alone. “Even if it was, how are they headless? That’s the one thing that kills ghouls.”

True. Actually, taking the head off killed most things. Which led back to those cartoonish torso monsters. Dean jumped to the only other thing he could possibly think of. “I don’t supposed you noticed any hex bags or signs of witchcraft at the scene, did you?”

She stared at him like he was an idiot, which was fair. “No. But it’s a garbage house. The Lindbergh baby could be there. Nearly everything else is.”

Oh joy. He loved those scenes that were so polluted with stuff, you might as well burn it all down instead of searching it. “Well, I guess that means we have to pay a visit to the scene,” Dean said, concealing his true feelings. Which were to light the place up and walk away in action movie perfect slow motion.

Sam handed Jody’s phone back to her, and said, “Give us a call as soon as the coroner’s report comes in.”

“Will do. But I’ll bet you twenty bucks cause of death was the lungs being ripped out of their bodies.”

Neither of them were stupid enough to take that bet.

Once they returned to the car, Sam asked, “Why witchcraft?”

Dean shrugged. “I was thinking of reanimated corpses. Some witches can do that.”

“Without the heads? How would they eat the victims? And why would a witch bother? We’re talking major mojo here.”

“I didn’t say it was a perfect idea. It’s just it’s either that, or torso monsters, and frankly, witches are more palatable.”

Sam shook his head, and looked down at the very thin folder Jody had given him on their way out. Dean guessed it was the police records of the victims, which could be enlightening, or could mean absolutely nothing. It only mattered if they weren’t random victims. 

It was a relatively quick drive from the police station to the crime scene. Jody had not been kidding about it being a garbage house. It seemed like a garbage block, with most of the houses along both sides of the street empty and boarded up, tagged with graffiti. “What the hell happened here?” Dean wondered.

“The fracking boom,” Sam said, with obvious distaste. “They come in hard, bring in people looking for work on the rigs, and the second they’re done, they clear out. For people following the work, it’s not here anymore. So temporary communities like this just dry up and blow away.”

Dean nodded. “How in the hell do you find any time to read anything not monster related?”

Sam gave him a cutting look before getting out of the car. “Says the guy with the latest Stephen King novel on his nightstand.”

“That’s monster related,” Dean countered. “Fictional monster related, sure, but it kinda counts.” 

Maybe the empty neighborhood explained how weird torso monsters could walk around and not be seen. It was a shame, because he really didn’t want to give any credence to the torso monster theory. 

Yellow crime scene tape crisscrossed the doorway, for all the good it did. They ducked under it, and went inside. The fact that the door didn’t quite fit the frame anymore, because the jamb had been damaged, was a harbinger of things to come. That and the smell.

Of course it smelled like death, like shit and blood and fear sweat, which had a different scent than plain old body odor alone. But there were layers of other fun scents beneath that - garbage and food waste, and chemicals and the smell of something burned. Sam had to pause and turn away for a moment, probably so he wouldn’t lose his breakfast and add to the miasma, but it didn’t have the same effect on Dean. Why he didn’t know. He liked to think he wasn’t that inured to awful scents. Maybe the Mark was somehow helping. That, or the fact that he spent a long time in Purgatory, and the smell there was better than this, sure, but it really depended on where you were and when. You never wanted to be downwind of the Leviathans, because they didn’t care what body parts they left out to rot. 

Blood was splattered over the back wall of what must have been the living room/dining room of this place. Without furniture to provide context, it was just an open room. The carpet was dark with filth, so it was harder to pick out bloodstains there, and there was a pile of garbage against the right side wall. Cardboard boxes, a broken table, and a whole bunch of other stuff that didn’t make this place smell any better. It looked like there was scattered drug paraphernalia on the floor, as well as a huge burned spot in the carpet - which probably added to the chemical smell - where a fire had been lit, accidentally or on purpose. There were holes in most of the walls, where anything copper or metal had been ripped out. 

Jody was right. There could be anything here. Dean couldn’t fathom any witch desperate enough to plant a hex bag in this garbage pit, especially when they could just wait a couple days and let nature and bathtub meth take its course. 

Dean decided to check out where the bodies had been found, although he didn't expect to find anything but blood. He was slightly more interested in the sliding glass back door, or at least what was left of it.

There was a huge hole where someone had clearly broken through the glass, and the rest was hanging on to the frame in jagged chunks. If anything had come through the door without opening it, they would have been cut, but the glass looked clean. In fact, it was the cleanest thing in this place. Could the torso monsters open doors? Well, they had hands. Maybe.

“Jesus Christ,” Sam suddenly exclaimed, and reappeared in the living room, once again looking like he was about to hurl. 

“You found their bathroom, didn’t you?” Dean guessed. “That’s why I try and avoid the side rooms. You never know which door is going to lead to the shit show.”

“You could try not to sound so smug about it,” Sam said.

“Yeah, I could,” Dean agreed, opening the door. It slid easily, like the track was greased. If a door was broken, why lock it?

The backyard, such as it was, was pathetic. A little square of concrete made up what he imagined was supposed to be the back deck, and some dead grass made up the rest of the yard, to what looked like a community fence of some sort. It was thin wood and hadn’t been weather treated, so it was already showing signs of rot. The community fence also wrapped around the sides, so he didn’t have a good view of the neighbor’s backyards, but he couldn’t imagine they were any different. 

Still, he decided to look, because what the hell, right? At least he was out of the stink farm. 

The house on the left side had an impressive amount of beer cans and pizza boxes piled up into a little pyramid, but considering their proximity to the fence, Dean guessed the guys who’d been crashing here were responsible for it, hefting this garbage over. Why this stuff, and not the rest of the garbage? Who knew? Two were too dead to ask. 

Dean looked over to the house on the right side, and saw mostly graffiti, but as he was turning away, something made him stop and look back. What?

Sam came out, and took a deep breath. “Oh god, fresher air. Relatively.”

Dean was still staring at the fence across the way. It was just typical graffiti by kids too suburban to give a shit what it actually was. There were attempted tags, maybe a curse word or a really badly drawn dick, but these kids were unfamiliar with using spray paint as an artistic medium, and it showed. What was with kids today? Dean could drawn several symbols in spray paint with unerring accuracy. It wasn’t that hard to use spray paint. Sure, it wasn’t like markers, or blood, but it wasn’t too difficult. 

That was when he finally saw it. It was partially hidden between the black tag that might also have been a test spray, and a random red h. “See something?” Sam asked, coming over.

Dean pointed. “There. That’s not graffiti.”

Sam squinted, trying to see what it took Dean about a minute to find. “Uh, all I’m seeing is graffiti.”

“Relax your eyes. Pretend it’s like one of those lame magic eye posters. Except this isn’t a dolphin.”

“How would you know? You never did figure those out.”

“I have better things to do than stare at a stupid picture. If I wanted to see a duck, I’d look at one.”

Sam opened his mouth, probably to say something that would make Dean cuff him on the back of the head, when he went perfectly still, save for the new tension in his shoulders. He finally saw it. “That’s a summoning sigil.”

“Yeah, but summoning what?”

Sam took a picture of it with his phone. “Don’t know. I guess we’ll have to find out.”

That was the job. But Dean was going to be so mad if it was torso monsters. 

 


	3. Dorian

For once, a double homicide wasn’t an omen of a terrible day.

Well, it was for the dead men. But for Jody, not so much. After the boys left, it was a quiet, ordinary morning. There was a neighbor dispute, a drunk and disorderly, Roscoe was caught shoplifting again, there was an illegal parker on the high street, and a woman who may have been on too much Xanax complained about stolen mail. Jody had more than enough time to finish up her paperwork, and take her lunch break at home.

She liked to do it as often as she could, which meant maybe about once or twice a week, but she did her best to be back when Alex came home from school, which more or less correlated with her lunch time. Alex was doing extremely well, amazingly well, and that’s why she was worried about her. She was showing up to her therapist appointments on time, doing her homework, doing the chores Jody assigned her with little fuss. And that wasn’t like any teenage girl she’d ever known. 

She invited the boys over, because it was easier to talk and compare notes about things that ate people without civilians around. They brought sandwiches, because she didn’t have time to make anything. What was she, a saint? But she had some good, non-alcoholic ginger beer that left a nice, solid burn of actual ginger in the back of your throat. Donna found it too spicy, but Donna would. Alex was chillingly indifferent to it, as she was most things.

She hadn’t intended to talk with Sam and Dean about this, because what could they know about raising emotionally troubled teenager? “Okay, so, she probably doesn't know if she even trusts herself right now, and she’s sticking to routines and following orders because it makes her feel like she’s in control of some aspect of her life,” Dean said, putting down his sandwich. “I mean, she grew up as a bait dog for a bunch of sick vampire fucks. She couldn't recognize normal with a telescope and a map. She probably feels like she’s three seconds from flying apart. You’re gonna have to go easy with her. If she thinks she’s deciding something, that might work better.”

Jody sat up straight and stared at him. “Who are you and what have you done with Dean?”

Sam, who seemed just as fascinated by this sudden burst of lucidity from his brother, said, “I know. Whenever this happens I feel like I've slipped into a parallel universe.”

Dean turned his scowl on Sam, who was a safer target than Jody. “Gee, thanks.”

It did remind Jody of some of the tales Bobby had told her about the boys. It sounded like they grew up essentially feral, with their father more gone than present, and monsters constantly circling. The fact that they were still alive was kind of remarkable in and of itself, and became even more remarkable when you realized that barely domesticated man-child Dean was probably the sole reason they made it through intact. According to Bobby, he was more Sam’s dad than John, and he was only four years older than him. That was fucking crazy! She also knew Bobby hadn’t approved, and got into some crazy fights with John over the years, including the apex of it, which was him threatening to shoot John with buckshot. As far as she was concerned, Bobby had made a poor decision. He should have went live rounds, full metal jacket. She would have. She didn’t give a fuck what John thought he was doing; what he was actually doing was leaving children to fend for themselves in a world far more dangerous than it had any right to be. They should have been protected, not turned into killing machines just to survive.

But that led back to Dean, clearly sleep starved and pretending he wasn’t being slowly eaten alive, giving sound parenting advice. Because technically, he had been one. Also, Jody figured he was speaking about himself. Sticking to following orders so he could pretend he had some choice in this, finding comfort in the routine, never quite trusting himself or anyone else, always three seconds from flying apart. Which still seemed true. Christ. And that term - bait dog for vampires. It was brutal, and encapsulated her experience well. That really was all Alex had been to them. Poor girl. 

And Dean’s terrible childhood probably explained how he could whipsaw between goofy and Terminator, sometimes within a five minute span. He was probably more than a little crazy, but the fact that both him and Sam weren't permanently housed in a mental hospital was probably a miracle. 

“Well, fine parenting advice aside,” Jody said. “It’s hard not to worry. When I was her age, I was sneaking off, going to concerts, trying cigarettes. Hell, I got my first tattoo then.”

“You have tattoos?” Dean asked, suspiciously bright eyed. “Can I see them?”

“No.”

“The fact that she’s trying is something,” Sam said. “I mean, I can’t imagine what it was like to be raised by vampires.”

“Can I guess what they are?” Dean asked, still talking about her tattoos. 

She gave him her best frosty stare. “No.” Jody glanced at the clock on the microwave. “Alex should be back in five minutes, so tell me, did the garbage house yield any clues we missed?”

“We found a summoning sigil mixed in the graffiti of the house next door,” Dean said, his shoulders sagging as he visibly gave up on asking about her tattoos. Good. 

“Okay. What does it summon?”

“We’re waiting on that,” Sam admitted. “I have a program that runs symbols and sigils through the Men of Letters database, but sometimes it can tale a while. There’s a lot of them.”

She bet. “Okay, give me your professional opinions - how dangerous is this?”

Sam and Dean shared one of their looks, where you would swear they were telepathic and sharing information, but keeping you out of it. If one day they did come out and admit they were mind readers, she wouldn't be the least bit surprised. Dean finally looked back at her, and that’s when she knew it was bad news. That was his job. “Extremely. It’s killed and eaten two people, and it may have been a deliberate attack by someone for unknown reasons.”

That made her sit forward. “Deliberate? You think that was a planned hit?”

Sam grimaced at her choice of words. “We have no reason to believe it was personal. But somebody put that sigil up. They may have been testing the power of it.”

“To use it more deliberately next time,” Jody said, finishing the thought. 

Both Dean and Sam nodded, which led even more credence to her secret telepath theory. Actually, Jody took the fact that there had been no further reports on the walking headless corpses as a bad sign. It meant they were smart enough to go to ground. The dumb shit monsters were always the easiest to deal with. “Do you have any idea what we’re dealing with? Is this a witch or something?”

“Not necessarily,” Sam said. “If you know what you’re doing, anyone can draw a symbol.”

Dean looked ready to contradict him. “This is an obscure one. Even we don’t know what it brings, and we've see a shit ton of these.”

Sam shook his head. “In this day and age, anyone can find dangerous shit on the internet that they’re in no way ready for. And there was no sign of witchcraft at the house.”

“Yeah, but it was a garbage house. It could have been right under our feet and we wouldn’t have seen it. It-”

“Shh!” Jody hissed, as she heard the familiar sigh and squeak of old pneumatic brakes. The school bus was here. Both Sam and Dean had shut up and sat up straighter, which almost made her want to laugh. Was this what happened when you didn't grow up with a female authority figure in your life? “Alex is home, we’re done discussing this for now. Got it?”

Sam nodded, and Dean said, “Yes ma’am.”

Oh, so weird.  She wondered what would happen if she ordered them to roll over, or give her their paws.

 

Alex came in, quiet as always. She dressed in what could best be described as normcore - sensible blouses, shoes, fairly demur skirts or pants. Today it was a pale blue shirt and jeans that were neither too tight or too loose. Jody kind of wished she wore brighter colors, or did something that let her personality shine through, but she seemed content to disappear into the crowd. It was probably a survival mechanism. She must have noticed the Impala in the driveway, because as soon as she was inside, she came over, books held to her chest like a shield. "Nothing's wrong, is it?"  


 

"Nope, just passing through," Dean lied smoothly. He gave her his most reassuring smile. "How are you doing?"  


 

"Fine," she lied, nowhere near as smoothly. Dean had had a lifetime to learn this; Alex was a few years behind. She quickly looked away from him, and to Jody. "I'm gonna go upstairs. I have an English paper to finish."

"Don't you want something to eat?" Jody asked, to Alex's already retreating back.

"No, I'm good," she lied again, and went straight upstairs. As soon as her door closed, Jody sighed.  


 

"She is doing better," Dean said. "It's just a slow process."

He said it like he meant it, not like he was lying to be kind. Had he noticed something she missed?  


 

"We're gonna be staying at Clearwater Motel, at least until we find these bastards," Dean said.  


 

Jody raised an eyebrow at that. "I have a couple of spare rooms."

Dean shook his head. "Thanks, but Alex would feel better if we weren't here, so we're not gonna be." Sam acquiesced to this with a nod.  


 

Okay, he'd definitely picked up something. Or he was imagining what he would like if he was her? Or was it this Mark of Cain nonsense? Maybe all of the above.

"Fine. But keep me in the loop, okay?  I need to know what we're looking for, beyond surprisingly mobile headless corpses."

"As soon as we know, you'll know," Sam said.

While she believed them, Jody didn't feel any better. There was some mystery monster chomping down on her people, and just maybe there was a mastermind behind it all, working towards an unknown but surely bloody goal. 

Still, between her and the Winchesters, that thing better fucking run. Because they were going to kill it for damn sure.

**

The Mark had been bothering Dean since they left the crime scene.

Was it the smell of blood and death? Belatedly, he thought so. He also thought the only reason he even saw that summoning sigil buried beneath all the graffiti was because the Mark caught it, not him. It responded to the magic of it. That was also how he knew it was black magic, or something deep down the mojo hole. He couldn’t tell Sam this, because he knew how he’d respond. He’d be torn between benching Dean and getting the fuck out of town, and there was no way in fucking hell they were leaving Jody to deal with this alone. So Dean was pretending the Mark wasn’t being an insistent bastard in the back of his head, making the skin on his right arm feel like it was crawling, while a little voice in his mind urged him to do something, kill something. 

When Alex came in, Dean was made aware he could smell fear coming off her, like simply their presence reminded her of things she didn’t like to think about, and the Mark zeroed in on that as a sign of weakness.

 

What was the mental equivalent of screaming at something in your head? Dean did that, whatever it was. He let it know he was ripping his own fucking arm off if that line of thought continued. He’d do it too. He could have his knife out and buried in his elbow before the fucking thing knew it. 

The Mark quieted after that. But not for long, because it was never for long. But at least they’d returned to the car by then, and Sam had a response on his search. “It’s the sigil of summoning the trials,” Sam reported, frowning at his laptop.

Dean considered that, seeing if it made any sense. Not really. “What kind of trials?”

“That’s not clear. But this is bad news.”

“What gave it away? The two guys with their lungs ripped out? Or the headless guys walking around?”

Sam gave him a pissy look for that, but it was fair. “The sigil is from the Bloody Bible, a ritualistic manual of black magic, that was supposedly destroyed in a fire in Portugal in the late eighteen hundreds. But the Men of Letters have a report on it, saying that, in essence, bootleg copies of several of the spells were made and circulated, so some of the spells are still out there. Most of them require a great deal of blood and souls, and the spells supposedly could let you hold sway over “creatures most unholy”.”

That caught his attention. “Demons?”

“Yes, them and creatures of the darkness. Basically, it was a manual for building your own monster army.”

“Fantastic. So that’s what someone’s doing here?”

Sam read for a moment, still frowning. “It would depend on how much of the Bloody Bible they have. The last time the Men of Letters had any contact with something from it was back in 1958, where a man tried to summon demons to kill his boss and several co-workers.”

“What happened there?”

“He did the spell wrong. The demons killed him instead. The Men of Letters had to send the demons back to Hell.”

Dean smirked at the instant karma there. Nothing liked being controlled by someone else, and demons had to be at the top of that particular list. Then the Mark throbbed, and reminded him he wasn’t exactly the captain of his own ship anymore. Was he talking about himself too? “I don’t suppose anything in the Bloody Bible could help me, huh?”

Sam looked at him, eyebrows raised in surprise. That hadn’t crossed his mind. ” I doubt it. You’re dealing with a curse, not a monster, although it may feel like a monster.” He paused briefly, looking slightly uncomfortable. “How are you doing? I mean, is it ... bad? Are you okay?”

Dean wondered how Sam would take the truth.  _ ‘I almost cut my own arm off because it saw Alex as prey. I’m doing super.’ _ But he didn't dare say anything like that, because Sam would probably demand he return to the bunker, where Dean could feel himself slowly dying in peace. “I’m fine. Or at least as fine as I can be.”

Sam frowned, studying him like he didn’t quite believe him, but Dean knew he could sell this lie, because the truth was probably unthinkable to Sam. “You don’t have to suffer in silence, okay? If you’re doing poorly, you’d tell me, right?”

The Mark altered him to the fact that it could smell fear on Sam now. A bulletin he did not want or need. He still had his knife, and he didn't care if the Mark didn't disappear, or if he grew his arm back like a fucking starfish, Dean was determined to teach it a lesson about singling out friends and family as potential prey. Did it think he wouldn't? Did it think any amount of pain made any difference to him now? Because it didn't, and it had to know that. He would put up with any pain to save his family. He was willing to prove it. He was willing to cut off his own arm with a fucking fork if it came to that.

The Mark subsided. For a moment. 

Dean nodded. “I would. So, this case - are we still maybe looking for torso monsters?”

Sam grimaced, as if the subject change clued him in on how much Dean was lying. “Probably.”

“But also we need to find the person who may be controlling them for their own ends?”

“Yep.”

“Awesome.” Dean started the car, and wondered, for the seventh time today, if he was going to make it that long. 


	4. Fuel To Fire

In some cases, there were no good choices. Such as this one.

They didn’t know if the torso monsters would strike again, if they would be alone, or where. You’d think Sioux Falls would be smaller than it was, but it was sizable. The likelihood that the monsters and its master would strike the same bereft neighborhood was less than zero. So it was a case of hunkering down and being ready for anything, with the police scanner open, and enough coffee to kill a rabbit. 

Normally, they took shifts - someone was up, listening and trying not to die of boredom, while the other slept. Sam was afraid to do this, and Dean knew it was Mark related, but he eventually convinced him, since he was getting so little sleep, this was ideal for him.

But Sam insisted Dean try and get some sleep first, so he did. He slept for about an hour, and woke up when he hit the floor, gun in hand, aiming at ... something. He honestly couldn’t remember his nightmare this time. He also had no memory of grabbing the gun - which he deliberately kept in the bedside table, because there was no point in keeping weapons under his pillow now that the Mark made him a full time weapon - or throwing himself out of bed. Dean really didn’t like this. Memory gaps could be simple exhaustion, right? He’d had them before the Mark, and not all attributable to drinking. The hunter lifestyle wasn’t conducive to good sleep or general health.

For some reason, the title of that old graphic novel floated into his head while he was trying to calm his racing heart.  _ It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken _ . He could have laughed, except the dark tide of the Mark needed to settle down first. He felt like he was standing on a razor thin ledge, and the slightest shift of gravity would send him plummeting down into nothingness. He wished Cas was here. He’d feel better. But he had his own shit going on, and he couldn’t keep relying on him to play guardian of the Mark. It wasn’t fair.

Dean put the gun away as soon as possible, and did his best to ignore the fear stink he could pick up on himself. The Mark was not a fan.

Once he’d cleaned up and dragged his feet, so Sam thought he’d gotten more sleep than he had, Dean spelled him off. He waited for about hour, which he felt was more than enough time for Sam to be well asleep, and then Dean headed out.

One of the good things about this day and age? There was a phone app for just about everything, including police scanners. He could listen on the go.

Dean told himself he was only going to find a bar, get a drink, try and relax, but there was no relaxing, and while a drink would be nice, he wouldn’t feel it. Dean tried to tell himself he wasn’t hunting, but he was totally hunting. He gave up on the attempts at self-deception about twenty minutes south of the motel.

This guy, if he was going to pull this stunt again, would do it on the bad side of town. Generally, if Tom Waits ever wrote a song about where you lived or someone like you, you were in monster town. It was prime monster territory for the same reason human serial killers liked it - who was going to sweat losing some homeless guys, a sex worker, or a junkie? The answer should have been everyone, but it wasn’t. Feathers were ruffled when your average suburban person went missing, and went into full tilt panic if someone wealthy did, but the farther you went down the class and race scale, the less of a fuss was made. It was fucked up, and allowed monsters - human and otherwise - to thrive, but no one was in any hurry to fix it. In fact, after having seen this for decades, he was of the opinion that the people who could honestly change this didn’t want to. They were fine with this arrangement. Why? What was in it for them? Were they all possessed? Dean thought it would be more palatable if they were all actual monsters instead of human monsters, but he bet not. He bet they were mostly human, and just didn’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. Humanity was becoming an endless source of disappointment. 

Dean stopped in a really shitty bar, and had a drink, but quickly bailed when he realized the odds of him getting in a bar fight were very high. There were too many restless, aggressive drunks itching for trouble, and he was too aware that he would destroy them. All of them. Possibly at once. The Mark was looking forward to that. So he had his drink and hit the road.

Dean hadn’t taken the Impala. There was a chance the sound of the engine would wake up Sam, and also, Dean felt like he needed to burn energy to keep the Mark quiet, which meant a shit ton of walking. He’d walked so far, he actually had no idea where he was in the city, and which direction he’d have to head in to get back to the motel. He figured he’d cross that bridge when he had to. For a moment, Dean felt the type of burn in his calves that said he’d been walking too long and too far, but it disappeared so fast, he could have imagined it. He was never sure. 

Dean knew he’d hit one of the worst parts of town when foot traffic all but disappeared. People didn’t like to walk these streets at night. Perfect. He could feel his arm burn in anticipation. 

He walked down deserted streets, posture casual, hands in pockets, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He felt eyes on him long before someone revealed themselves. “You’re far from home, aren’t you?” 

This was said by a man, loitering at the head of a very narrow alley. He was young, probably in his late teens to early twenties, about Dean’s height, but maybe a third of both his weight and muscle mass. It looked like a stiff breeze could crack him in half. Assuming he was human. It was too early to say. “I’m right where I want to be,” Dean replied. 

The kid eyed him, in a way that was partially predatory and partially curious. “You’re pretty for an older guy. What you looking for?”

Dean figured this guy was a hooker, a drug dealer, or possibly both, and despite that, felt a flash of irritation at the “older guy” crack. “Monsters,” he told him.

The kid snickered, leaning one hip against the wall. “Then you’ve come to the right place. They’re all over.”

“I’m looking for very specific ones. Have there been weird things going on in the last couple of days? People disappearing for no good reason, strange people suddenly setting up shop where others had been?”

For a second, Dean saw recognition in his dark eyes. But it was only a second, and then his flinty look returned, a street kid slamming down the shields. Trust was pretty much the only thing you had on the street, and it was the one thing people wanted to take from you at all times. Pretty fucked up. “Are you a cop or something? I’m not a snitch.”

“I’m so far from a cop, I think I might still be on some states’ wanted lists. I’m a ... private investigator.” Close enough, right? 

He didn’t look any less guarded. “I thought those only existed in old movies.”

“No, it’s an actual job. A shitty job, but what isn’t?”

That got the tiniest scoff from the kid. He was starting to relax, but only in increments. “Life is a shit buffet. Sometimes you can choose, but all you can choose from is different kinds of shit.”

Dean was starting to feel with this kid on a whole other level, which meant things were bad. Again, he had the Mark. It was not the time to embrace nihilism as a lifestyle. “I know you know what I’m talking about. Willing to show me where these people are?” He was giving him sharp side eye, suggesting there was no trust there, but you didn’t need trust when you had money. Dean pulled two twenties out of his pocket, and said, “I’ll make it worth your while.”

His eyes snapped to the cash, and he reached for it, but paused. “And you want me to do what again?”

“Just show me where these new, strange people are. You don’t have to stick around after.”

The boy continued to study him, as if trying to determine whether he was a threat or not. He was, but he hoped he didn’t pick up on that. “And that’s it?”

“That’s all.”

Finally, he plucked the money out of Dean’s hand. “I’ve had some weird requests, mister, but this has gotta be one of the weirdest.”

He bet. He also knew he didn’t want to know what the other candidates were. “One thing. Don’t set me up or try and jump me. It won’t end well for you or however many friends you have in on it.”

He stiffened slightly, tucking the money away in his pocket. “Is that a threat?”

“No. You treat me fair, I’ll treat you fair. But if things get punchy ... sometimes I can’t control it.”

“Control what?”

“The rage.” He couldn’t tell him that sometimes, when the Mark came out to play, it left him behind. Sometimes he was in the co-pilot’s seat; sometimes he was shoved all the way to the back of the bus, and he could never get any closer. He tried, but he failed. More and more, the Mark was taking him over by inches, but the more that time elapsed, the more Dean could feel himself slipping away. There would be a day, much sooner than he’d want it to be, when he would go under, and he wouldn’t come back. But because time didn’t mean anything when you were drowning, he couldn’t actually judge how much time he had left. Dean could only hope he had more than he thought. 

The kid continued to scan him, like he might be a serial killer or a crazy person, Finally, he said, “What, are you related to my step-dad or something?”

“Doubt it. Just wanted to make that clear.”

“Fine.” The kid turned, and rather than head down the alley, which Dean expected, he crossed the street. Dean followed. He kept an eye out for any shadows, but no one was obviously following them. 

“What do I call you?” Dean asked. He knew better than to ask for a name. 

“Friends call me Dingo.”

Dean didn’t laugh, but he kind of wanted to. “Did you eat someone’s baby?”

He stopped and turned, looking surprised. “Holy shit. You get the reference? I think you’re the first person beyond Gato to get it.”

“You didn’t actually eat someone’s baby, did you?” If he was a monster, that possibility was on the table.

Dingo shook his head and went back to walking. “No. I just eat like a pig whenever I have a chance.”

Dean looked at his slender frame again, and internally grimaced. He was going to have to slip him a few more bucks, assuming he wasn’t a vampire or something, and assuming he wasn’t leading him to a spot for an attempted mugging. “I know the feeling.”

Dingo glanced over his shoulder at him, as he led him down a side street. “You used to be a street kid?”

“No. There were just times when food was pretty scarce.”

 “Yeah. Being poor completely sucks.”

“Yeah.” It was a weird thing to bond over. But if not for credit card fraud, Dean imagined he would have drowned in debt long before the Mark had the chance to get him.

They cut across a vacant lot, which was riddled with trash and the remains of a condemned and destroyed building, and he saw a couple of homeless guys, but they looked sacked out for now. It looked like Dingo was leading him towards what appeared to be some old factory that had been either turned into an apartment/loft sort of thing, or had hoped it would become that someday. Now it looked like a shadowy behemoth, a squat toad of a building blighting an already polluted landscape. 

Dingo paused, right where the vacant lot became chewed up asphalt, and waited for Dean to stand beside him before he started talking. “Okay, as of two days ago, there were some of the older guys squatting in there? Guys who didn’t like to share, got very territorial. Know what I mean?” Dean nodded, and realized the Mark was heating up. Oh, there was something bad around here, all right. 

“But tonight, Delilah told me there’s some new dudes in there. Well, dudes in a gender neutral sense. And I mean new, as in no one’s ever seen them on the street before. They just wholesale moved in, and nobody knows where the old guys went. But supposedly the new kids are all ‘roided out and mean as shit. Colby was gonna go snoop on them? But nobody’s heard from him since. I mean, it’s Colby, so he coulda flaked, but I really didn’t think he’d ghost on Pixie like that.”

 

Dean sincerely hoped Colby was a nickname, because what kind of fucked up parent named their kid after cheese?

 

There was almost no lighting here, so Dean had to wait until his eyes adjusted to the darkness to see what looked to be new plywood nailed over the windows from the inside. Vampires? He was thinking so. Something not super crazy about daylight or witnesses. Dean nodded. “Yeah, I think this is exactly what I was looking for. Tha-”

Dean stopped as he felt the Mark pulse deeply, sending a shock throughout his entire body, and he’d had moments to recover from it when he started hearing the strangest noise.

The creepiest noise Dean had ever heard in his life was actually in a Japanese horror movie, Ju-On. When the vengeful female spirit showed up, it started making this glottal noise, sort of like insectoidal clicking, but by a thing incapable of making that kind of sound. According to the film’s director, it was an attempt at mimicking a person with a crushed larynx trying to scream. That was eighty thousand different kinds of no. The sound was creepy as fuck before Dean knew what it was supposed to be, and then when he learned what it was supposed to be, it got worse. It was a really good movie, he liked it a lot, but if he ever heard that noise in real life, he wouldn’t have been content to salt and burn the ghost - he’d have salted and burned the whole fucking house, right to the foundation, so nothing would ever grow or live there again. If nuking from orbit was an option, he’d take it. That was just a bucketful of nope, and he was not having it.

Which was why this sound instantly bothered him so damn much.

It wasn’t the exact sound, thank god, but it was close enough that all the hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention. Also, the sound didn’t go on and on, well past the point of endurance. It was like a _clk-clk-clk_ , almost like a grasshopper chirp, with its own rhythm. 

“What the fuck is that?” Dingo asked, looking around. In his fear, his massive ‘tude had fallen, and Dean realized this guy was younger than he thought. Fuck, he was a kid. What was he, seventeen? Why in motherfucking hell was he selling his ass on the street? 

But Dean didn’t really have time to wonder, as he saw one of the things making that noise, approaching from the far right. It was wearing a green coat way too large for it, hood up, which gave a loose impression of a head. Which was good, because the coat fell open, and revealed it didn’t have one. Dean quickly checked, but yes, there was another one, in a similar blue coat, approaching from the left. Dean took a position in front of Dingo, roughly equidistant from both monsters, and said, “Run. I’ll hold them off.”

“What? What the fuck are these things?” Dingo exclaimed. He was getting panicked, which wasn’t good at all. Monsters loved that shit. 

At least now that he’d gotten a really good view of them, Dean could safely tell Sam that the akephaloi were so ridiculous looking, you almost forgot to be completely fucking terrified of them.

Almost. 

 


	5. I Could Give You All That You Don't Want

Dean honestly wished Dingo had run for it. Enough civilians had gotten mixed up in this already.

But he went into that panicked/frozen thing that happened a lot when someone’s reality, as they knew it, suddenly fractured and fell to pieces around them. Dean imagined it was hard, although his life had always been in pieces. 

The akephaloi were just so fucking ridiculous. They had barrel chests, and eyes where their pecs should be, although they were fist sized and had no discernible iris. And their mouth was a clean slice across their midsection, and Dean was surprised they could open their mouth without making the top of their head flop over. It was absurdly wide, and there was no way the anatomy made any sense - did they keep their stomach in their legs? How did they work? And they had two rows of teeth, like a shark, with the inner teeth being smaller and more numerous than the outer teeth, which ranged in size from almost palm sized to cocktail olive sized. Again, the anatomy on this thing was fucked up. It shouldn’t have been able to exist, but here it was. Making a sort of creepy cricket noise, and coming right towards them. 

Although it was hard to judge, the thing on the right seemed to be closest, so he pulled out his .45 and started emptying his clip into it. Center mass was generally considered a good place to shoot, but what about when the creature was mostly center mass? Dean decided to put holes everywhere, and see what got a reaction. 

Gap between the mouth and eyes? Nothing. Bullet made a neat hole, but the creature didn’t seem to notice. Mouth? He got some teeth, but it didn’t care. Place between the eyes and the shoulder? Nope. It wasn’t even bleeding, or if it was, it was doing it so slowly it was hard to tell. Leg? Didn’t even limp. Dean finally put a couple in one of its eyes, just to see what happened, and finally it stopped, and reached for its eye. Wonderful. He emptied what was left of the clip into its eye socket, and when he paused to reload, Dingo shouted, “Why do you have a gun? What’s going on?”

“When I told you I was looking for monsters, I wasn’t being figurative,” he said, popping the empty clip and putting another in. “Can you fire a gun?”

Dingo was staring at him, wide eyed, his hands over his ears, because he wasn’t so accustomed to explosions going off  close to his head that he was kind of used to them by now. He also looked barely fifteen. Shock was somehow making him younger. “I’m American, so ... yeah?”

Dean dug out his spare gun, and handed it to him. He seemed reluctant to take it. “Aim for the eyes. You take the one on the right.” Dean quickly pivoted and fired at the one bumbling in on the left, pulping its eye, and turning it to jelly running down its elongated, mishapped head/body. Because its body was its head, right? It was essentially a walking, eating head with legs. Which made no fucking sense. But how much sense did other monsters make? If he was honest, very few. Hell, did humans make much sense? Life was a fucking joke, and nothing mattered. Why was he even out here, trying to bury these things?

Dingo shot at the one on the right, but he missed by a country mile. Dean, meanwhile, had already taken out the other eye of the one on the left. It had stopped walking forward, but was now making a speeded up version of the chirp noise, which he took to mean alarm. You’d think, having both eyes shot out would mean death. But nope, these things were apparently verging on immortal. What the fuck? Were they in god mode? Couldn’t these things just fall down? Their center of gravity couldn’t have been helpful. 

Dingo had stumbled back, and shook out his arm. “Holy fuck, this thing has a kick.”

“Brace yourself. Two handed grip,” Dean told him, sure this kid wasn’t going to be able to hit it. “Switch. Target practice on the one on the left. I’ll take the one on the right.”

The rightmost akephaloi still had one intact eye, and the hole in its head from its missing eye seemed to make no difference to it. Dean had a machete on his back, hidden beneath his coat, because he knew there was a possibility he’d have to decapitate something. He holstered his gun, took out the machete, and decided to see how much force it would take to chop one of these things in half. 

As Dean approached it, he felt the Mark burn, and it opened its mouth, as if preparing to take a chomp out of him. It had a tongue. Which seemed obvious, of course it had a tongue, but considering the size of its yap, he expected a tongue like a sleeping bag, which would have been bad enough. But in actuality its tongue was whip slender, black, and basically looked like a very large but skinny snake that lived in its cavernous mouth. Christ, was this thing designed somehow to be completely disturbing? 

He took a stance like he was trying to decapitate a leviathan, and swung, sinking the blade deep into its head/body, about halfway through. It didn’t seem to notice, except he knocked it off course a little. And when Dean tried to pull out the blade and take a second hack at it, he couldn’t.

The blade was stuck. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Dean snapped, as the thing lunged forward and tried to bite him with its ridiculous mouth. Dean jumped back, but when the teeth slammed together on empty air, they made a percussive sort of sound you could almost feel. Yes, this ludicrous thing with its silly mouth and poor design had the bite force necessary to turn a human limb into tooth pick sized splinters. It wasn’t fast, but it made up for it in overall strength. 

He pulled out his gun and shot it as close to point blank in its remaining eye, making it explode into goo. And it barely noticed.

Son of a bitch. What was it going to take to put these fucking things down? 

**

A nightmare woke Sam up, and for the first few minutes he did nothing but stare at the ceiling, and listen to his heartbeat thunder in his ears as he wondered what the fuck he was going to do. 

He couldn’t remember what his nightmare was about, but he was sure it was about Dean. Lately that’s all they’d been about. The Mark taking him over and Dean just being gone. He had to find a way to fix this before it became prophecy. But how?

Finally he checked his phone for the time, and realized he’d only been asleep for two hours or so. Somehow he felt more exhausted than he had before he got to sleep. 

He went to the bathroom, was briefly startled by how reflection in the mirror, and went to see how Dean was doing on police scanner duty. 

Sam wished he was surprised to find Dean’s room empty, but he wasn’t. The Impala was still in the lot, so he told himself Dean had walked to the nearest bar. He didn’t want to drive drunk; he was being responsible. 

Except, no. Old Dean would have walked to the bar for a few drinks. Pre-Mark Dean. Before it started taking him over like a slow but pernicious virus. Dean was out hunting; throwing red meat to keep the monster at bay, or, as he said, “take the edge off”. Sam tried calling his phone, but it went straight to voice mail. He’d had his phone off, the bastard. 

Some part of Sam didn’t want to believe this. He wanted Dean to be getting wasted in the local bar. He drove there - taking the Impala felt like willing Dean to show up and get mad at him - and found the bar surprisingly busy for the time of night. But there probably wasn’t a whole lot else to do around these parts.

Of the two bartenders currently working, he caught the attention of the pretty dark haired woman, who Dean totally would have hit on. Although that was far from special. Dean flirted with everyone, men as well as women, because he was a strategist, and he knew if you were pretty and people liked you, they were more inclined to let you slide. Dean would occasionally deny this, which Sam didn’t understand. He was just using every weapon he had within reach, which Dean had always taught him to do when they were growing up. Get leverage any way you could. Sam didn’t do the whole flirting thing, because he wasn’t great at it, and he knew he had never figured out how to weaponize the charm he had, whereas it was simply another gun in Dean’s arsenal. And hey, it worked for Dean, so more power to him. Sure, Dad wouldn’t have liked it, but Dad wasn’t taking care of them for big chunks of time, and Dean and Sam had to do the best they could with what they had. Dean learned early a nicely applied bit of charm or schmooze could spare you a stint in juvie, or cause a clerk to look the other way when you were attempting a five finger discount. 

Sam had an awkward moment trying to find out if Dean had been in here. He couldn’t exactly go up and say, “Hey, was my brother here? He is ridiculously good looking, but carries himself like he knows it, because he does.” Still, if he said that, Sam was sure she’d know who he was immediately, if she had ever encountered him. 

It had been really weird growing up with a brother who could, without intending to do so, steal any girl you had a crush on. Dean didn’t really grow into handsome until his late teens, which, by happenstance, was when Sam was going through his chunky and miserable phase. It was always strange to watch people’s brains all but fly out of their ears when Dean turned up, while forgettable Sammy was just that - forgotten. He may as well have never been in the room.

Of course, when his growth spurt hit, he was never chunky again. But he felt like he’d glimpsed another world. The one where pretty people were given everything, and everyone considered less than was ignored. It was strange, and an unsettling glimpse of humanity. And to be completely fair to Dean, while he was a pretty boy who knew he was pretty, no one hated him quite as much as he did. Dean was his own worst enemy in so many senses of the term it stopped being funny years ago. 

The bartender was named Gia, and had not seen Dean in earlier. She may have tried to throw a flirt Sam’s way, but he was in no mood. He thanked her, and left. 

So Dean was off hunting. Where? He had to find him, before ... in case ... shit. He couldn’t lose it now. Sam knew he should have insisted Dean sit this one out. Not that he knew how he could have made him. He could only use the guilt card so many times. 

Assuming nothing popped up on the scanner, where would Dean go? All he could think was the bad side of town. Which was where? He did not have Dean’s unerring ability to find the bad side of any town. It was a weird gift of his. He knew all the make out spots, all the bars with loose carding policies, and the absolute worst place you could be in any city after two AM. It was an extremely dubious superpower. Sam’s was always finding libraries, which was honestly more useful, although Dean didn’t see it that way. He wouldn’t. But it encapsulated their personalities well, didn’t it? Dean looked for trouble; Sam looked for answers. 

After thinking about it a moment, Sam remembered Jody once saying something about a bar called Merrill’s. She was endeavoring to get it shut down, because it was nothing but a trouble magnet. If Dean was in a bar, it would be that one. He looked up the address on his phone, and drove there.

Sam didn’t go in, because police were there, arresting some people at the bar. There’d been a fight, and cops were playing clean up. Sam instantly knew Dean hadn’t taken part in this, because no one appeared badly injured. Hell, if the Mark took him over, there’d be a whole lot of dead drunks. But just because he wasn’t here now didn’t mean he wasn’t here earlier. At least Sam knew he’d found the bad part of town.

Okay. Now, how the hell did he find Dean? Besides finding a trail of bodies and following it?

Sam knew there was a possibility he could find Dean, and it wouldn’t be Dean. It would be the Mark, wearing his body like a cheap suit. What would he do if he found Dean that way? What could he do?

Sam sat and thought, worried he was too late to do anything but pick up the pieces. 

**

Dean’s thought had given him an idea. 

The akephaloi were kind of slow. They didn’t seem especially coordinated, and they didn’t seem to have a great deal of flexibility either. Since they were essentially a head with legs, all they had was strength and persistence. If they didn’t sneak up on prey, all was lost. They probably got the two guys in the house because they were passed out. Had they been awake, they might have been able to stop the attack. 

  
So there were the weaknesses of the akephaloi. How did he make it work for them? 

Dean darted around the akephaloi that still had his machete buried in its stupid head/body, and shot it in the back. It stumbled forward, as Dean had caught it when it was trying to turn, and Dean planted a foot in its spine and sent it falling over, face first. He wanted to see what it would do.

The answer? Not much. It put its hands on the ground, and looked like it was trying to push itself up, but it was having issues. Here’s where coordination and their center of gravity worked against them. Also, it was more than possible that the strength they had in their bite didn’t necessarily translate into strength in their arms. 

Okay, new strategy. Knock them over. 

Dean stepped onto the one currently struggling to rise, and with added leverage, was finally able to yank the machete free. The thing didn’t really seem to notice, and standing on it, he got the impression it was one huge bundle of muscles, which, again, made no sense. If that was true, where was their digestive organs? Buried in muscles? “You’re fugly and ridiculous,” Dean snapped. 

“Umm, umm, little help,” Dingo said, backing away from the blind akephaloi. “Gun’s empty.”

This akepheloi had odd skin growing over its eye sockets. Son of a bitch, were their eyes regenerating? How was that fucking fair? There were probably only one or two ways to actually kill these fucking things. And until Dean could get his hands on a chainsaw, they’d probably never know them.

  
Dean got behind the akephaloi, and took its legs out from under it, sending it crashing down to the ground on its back this time. He had a theory they were kind of like turtles, in that they found it difficult to self-right, especially when on their backs. Although it continued to snap its ludicrously large mouth in his direction, aware he was there, its arms and legs were flailing. Dean was correct. Like turtles.

The one he’d knocked onto its face was starting to rise, so Dean kicked it onto its back. While technically out of the fight, at least for now, he was going to have to do something with them. He couldn’t leave them out here for civilians to find. But what could he do with them?

“Dude?” Dingo asked, sound desperate and terrified. “Dude? What the hell are these things? What’s going on? I don’t ... what is this?”

Dean glanced at the kid, and noticed he was shivering. Since it was a fairly warm night, he figured it was fear and shock. He ignored the Mark’s assessment - weak; easy prey - and felt bad for him. This was a hell of a way to learn about the truth of the world. “Uh, well, in short - monsters exist, and these fucking stupid things are but a small portion of them. Sorry.” 

He scoffed. “That’s not ... no. That’s crazy.”

Dean was aware the Mark was still burning, and then he became aware of something else - eyes.

Lambent, silvery-yellow, and they seemed to pop up all around him, Dingo, and the two struggling akephalois. Dean scanned them, holding up his machete. He counted ten people. No, not people - vampires. Either the noise of the fight had drawn them out, or they were under the sway of the same thing calling the akephalois.

A tall guy, with a long mane of brown hair, stepped forward, snarling and showing his fangs. “What are you?” He was glaring at Dean while he said it, so there was no doubt who was being asked. “Your energy’s bonkers.”

“As far as you’re concerned, I’m death,” Dean told him. “Leave now, and maybe you get to live another night.”

A handful of the vampires laughed derisively, slowly contracting their circle and moving in. It certainly looked like they had him trapped. Dean wondered when they’d figure out they were screwed. Probably not soon enough to save them. 

“You really think you’ve got a chance here, blood bag? You’re outnumbered.”

“And you’re outclassed,” Dean replied. “Can you at least tell me who’s trying to control you?”

The long haired vampire snickered. “Nobody controls us, meat. We’re free as birds.”

“Or should we say bats?” A slender young girl said, taking Dingo’s arm and startling him. Before he could even attempt to pull away, a slender young man, who looked so remarkably similar to the girl Dean wondered if they were twins, grabbed Dingo’s other arm. He was caught between them. 

“That’s so corny, Bel,” her twin said.

She shrugged. “Yeah, but it’s a classic, right?”

Dean knew what was happening here. The vamps weren’t sure about him, so they were taking Dingo as a hostage. If Dean tried to move on them, they hurt the kid. But the Mark didn’t give a shit if they hurt Dingo or not. He was irrelevant. It could smell blood here, and wanted out. He was doing his best to hold it back, but he could feel his control slipping, millimeter by millimeter. It had found the akephaloi frustrating. An enemy that didn’t feel pain and couldn’t be killed was no fun at all.

But vampires? They were so ... fragile. He could almost feel their blood drying on his skin already. 

In his mind, Dean kept repeating the refrain, as if it could help at all, _ “Don’t hurt the kid, don’t hurt the kid, don’t hurt the kid.” _ He had no reason to believe the Mark would listen to him. 

It took an absurd amount of his strength just to spit out the words, “This is your only chance. Walk away now.”

“Or what?” the long haired vampire said. He rolled his eyes, and waved a hand dismissively in Dean’s direction. “Someone kill that tedious old fart already, I’m getting bored.”

And that’s when the dark tide of the Mark swallowed him whole. 

 


	6. Man of War

Dean had given up on trying to figure out the Mark, and why it did what it did. In the beginning he had tried, but it was pure rage and chaos. Using logic on it was like trying to put out a forest fire with a single cup of water. 

Sometimes it let him watch, but not participate; sometimes it let him take part; sometimes he was blacked out, and just came to in the aftermath. There was no rhyme or reason to it, as far as he could tell. It was often mad at him, but how it expressed that varied as well.

Right now, Dean felt like he was having an out of body experience, like he was outside himself, observing everything, like his body was an avatar in a video game. He didn’t like it, which is why he imagined the Mark was doing it. Sometimes, in lieu of venting itself, it liked to take things out on him. Sometimes, his suffering was enough.

Dean saw his posture change as the Mark took the driver’s seat. His shoulders straightened, and he started smiling. It was unnerving. Five vampires swarmed, competing to see who got to rip his neck open first, and Dean watched himself crouch down, as if trying to get small. Dean knew what the Mark intended to do, and wondered if the vamps had figured it out.

They didn’t. They closed in, and Dean saw himself stand and swinging the machete. He cut off the head of two vampires in sequences one right after the other. Considering how difficult it was to cut off one head, that was a pure display of superhuman strength. 

  
Without pause, he swung the machete in the other direction, but he only beheaded one vamp this time, because the others finally got it and jumped back. Dean turned to face the survivors and kept grinning in that deeply disturbing way. “Come on, dead boys,” Dean heard himself say. “Bite me.”

The long haired vampire lunged and tackled him from behind, but Dean hit the ground and rolled, and the two ended up briefly wrestling for dominance. The Mark won, because it always did. Dean watched himself straddle the vampire leader, and just start punching. 

He had the machete. He could have killed him. But killing wasn’t the point. Humiliating him first was. Punching a vampire should be, at most, a minor annoyance to the creature. They should never be hurt, because no one could hit a vampire that hard.

Except the Mark. It pummeled vamp boy, sending blood flying, and Dean was pretty sure he heard a crunch of bone, although he wasn’t sure if it was from the vamp’s face or his hands. Not that it mattered; the Mark would heal the damage he took, if any. The Mark never really seemed to take any.

A couple of other vampires joined the flagging party, and grabbed Dean, dragging him off the poor, beaten vamp. One ripped the machete away and the other grabbed him by the throat and threw him, but the Mark as laughing as it hit the ground. It wanted this. It could have killed them all in a minute, but it wanted to drag this out. It was more fun that way. 

The twins that still had a hold of Dingo said, “Stop or we kill him!”

Oh no. No no no ... Dean knew what the Mark’s answer was going to be before it said it, and he was shouting pointlessly,  _ “Kill those vampires! Don’t hurt the kid!” _

The Mark leered at them, and shrugged. “Go ahead. What do I care?”

_ “You care, you son of a bitch! I care!”  _ Dean shouted. For naught.

The Mark turned, pulling a hunting knife out of his jacket, and threw himself into pitched battle with three vampires, one of which had picked up the machete and was swinging it at the Mark. The Mark dodged the swing while simultaneously stabbing one vamp in the face, and ripping down, pretty much cutting their face in half. It wouldn’t kill them, but ooh, that was a tough injury to heal from, even for a vampire. 

Dingo screamed as one of the vampires sunk its fangs into his neck, and Dean screamed in rage as the Mark continued playing with its food, punching a vampire in the face with the knife, and then turning to savagely slash the neck of another, cutting all the way down to bone. It wasn’t a proper decapitation, but close enough, as the vampire collapsed, head barely hanging on. 

  
_ “Save the kid, you son of a bitch! You ever wanna come out again? Do it, or I’m keeping you in as long as I fucking can!”  _ Dean meant it, even though he knew there was a chance he’d never get control of his body back. But if it meant anything at all, he’d lie in wait for its one weak moment. In here, he had nothing but time.

Dean actually saw the Mark roll his eyes. But it yanked the knife out of the vamp’s face and threw it, nailing the vampire biting Dingo right in the side of the head. It was such a forceful throw, it sunk hilt deep into his skull.

It wasn’t a killing blow, but having metal in your brain did no one any favors, and the male twin let go of Dingo and stumbled away, eyes glassy, trying to reach up and grab the knife out of his skull, but his hand went oddly left of his target. He finally fell over, landing on the knife, and his sister dropped Dingo and ran to him, seemingly to help. But how long did it take a partially lobotomized vampire to heal? Dean bet it took a while.

Noticing the smile on the Mark’s - his - face, Dean realized the Mark hadn’t really done that in response to him. It was an experiment. It wanted to see what would happen if it stabbed a vampire in the brain. 

A vampire far from the Mark screamed, and Dean saw that one of the akephaloi was back on its feet, and had taken a chomp out of the first moving thing near it, which was a vampire’s arm. It was still eating it. The vampire had stumbled away with blood pouring from the stump of his left arm. “What the bloody fuck is that thing?” he shouted.

Oh good, a monster free for all. The Mark was very much into this. 

Long haired vamp grabbed the Mark from behind and sank his fangs into his neck, and Dean wondered why it didn’t elbow him or try and attack him. The Mark wasn’t going to kill him so it could take over full time, was it?

Dean only had a second to panic about that, because the vamp released him, spitting and gagging. “What the fuck is wrong with your blood?” 

What? What was that supposed to mean? Did his blood somehow change when the Mark took over? That made no sense ... but what about the Mark made sense? Much like akephalois, there was a huge chunk of information missing about it. What they didn’t know outweighed what they knew. 

A vampire ran at him with his discarded machete, and the Mark let him come in close and swing the machete before dodging the attempted hack, and grabbing the vampire’s arm. Dean heard bones snap in the vampire’s arm as the Mark twisted it and cut off his head with his hand still on the machete. It didn’t even pick up the machete, just let it drop with the body. Man, the Mark was a show off and a dick. 

The vamp leader collapsed to his knees, and the Mark went to him, grabbed his head, and twisted.

It was one of those things where, if Dean had seen it in a movie, he would have started laughing. The sounds of bones cracking like someone breaking dry branches was kind of disgusting, but the fact that the Mark pulled out Dean’s back up knife, and cut away the tendons before finally yanking his head off his body was overkill. Seriously. In any other context, this might be funny. You didn’t manually rip off someone’s head. Yet, the Mark had done just that. It was a display of strength and cruelty, meant to shock and horrify the remaining vampires, which is exactly what it did.

“What the fuck?!” the female vampire exclaimed. She’d pulled the knife out of her brother’s head, but he hadn’t recovered yet. 

The Mark, still holding the vamp's head by his long hair, glanced at the leader, who died in wide eyed surprise, and tossed it aside like so much garbage. “You fucking parasites think you can do anything to me? Really?”

The female vampire threw the knife, and the Mark plucked it out of the air casually. “No, seriously. When this chump told you you were outclassed, he meant it.”

“Why are you talking about yourself in the third person?” The vampire with the severed arm asked. He’d managed to kick the akephaloi down to the ground, but he hadn’t been able to hurt it any more than Dean had.

“Because he’s possessed or something,” the female vampire said. “That’s his weird energy.”

“Close, but not quite,” the Mark said, throwing the knife again. This time it buried itself in the head of the one armed vampire, who collapsed to the ground, right next to the akephaloi. With a simple swing over, the akephaloi bit off his head in one massive chomp, taking some of his shoulders as well. It spit out the knife like a watermelon seed. At least Dean now knew akephaloi would eat anything, including other monsters. 

The female vamp was now the only one left alive or functional in any capacity. She stood, supporting her brother, who still looked like he was about a day away from relearning how to speak or focus his eyes. The Mark looked at her, and gave her a leering smile. “Hey sweetheart, where do you think you’re going? We’re not done here.”

Dean was torn. She was a vampire, and she had been part of the murder crew that had probably drank several homeless people, whom no one would ever bother to report missing. But on the other hand, the Mark was bound to do something fucked up to her. Just killing clearly wasn’t enough for it.

“ _ Let me back,” _ Dean said.  _ “Give me this one.“  _

There was no way the Mark was listening to him. But he didn’t know what else to do. He really didn’t want to see the encore of ripping a vampire’s head off. 

**

Sam drove with the windows down, hoping he’d hear something that would lead him to Dean. It was a long shot at best, but Sioux Falls wasn’t exactly a hub of nighttime activity, and also, the cooler night air was helping wake him up. That and the searing anxiety eating a hole in his gut. At least he knew an angel willing to heal him.

Sam was about to give up on what was basically a pointless endeavor when he heard a gunshot. Or perhaps a car backfire. Hard to say. Firecracker?

It was relatively far away - eight blocks, maybe? - but as he turned around to check it out, he heard more pops. Yep, gunshots. And he was certain Dean was in the vicinity, if not completely responsible. Then he realized there were two guns firing, but one was being fired much faster than the other. What the fuck was Dean up to now? His mind immediately went to the end of The Wild Bunch, and frankly, fuck Dean for ever making him watch that. He didn’t need that in his head right now. 

He fired enough that Sam was able to guess a general area. He parked and quickly started down sketchy side streets, headed towards the noise. 

This was definitely a bad part of town, and Sam was kind of surprised he hadn’t encountered anyone, but when gunshots started flying, people did have a tendency to flee. He couldn’t blame them. It was the safer option.

When the gunshots stopped, it was worrying. The fact that there was periodic screaming made things worse. What the fuck was going on?

Sam got turned around, as navigating by sound was already tricky, especially when you suspected your hearing wasn’t the best due to years of proximity to live firearms without proper ear protection. But he knew he was on the right path when he started hearing voices. He recognized Dean’s voice, but it sounded a little more gloaty than usual. It was around that time that his blood started to turn cold. 

  
Was Dean in charge? Was it the Mark? He was afraid to find out. He pressed on regardless.

Sam eventually came to a small side alley that was kind of hard to navigate due to the amount of garbage in it, but he stopped worrying about making noise when he clearly heard what was going on. Who was he fighting? Too many, by the sound of it. 

Sam reached the end of the alley, and wasn’t completely sure what he was looking at at first. It was a vacant lot gone to seed, and there was a few scattered bodies about, like he’d stumbled onto a war zone or a crime scene. Dean seemed to be fighting vampires, and there were a couple of akephaloi as well. Although they seemed to be horrifying to behold, they weren't contributing much to the fight right now.

Sam was wondering if he had any dead man’s blood with him when he saw one of the the single most disturbing things he had ever seen. If he had any doubts about whether he was looking at Dean or the Mark, that question was put to bed when Dean ripped the head off one of the vampires.

Sure, he had to use a knife to cut away skin and tendons that refused to tear, but Sam was so shocked by it he wasn’t sure he actually saw what he saw, suddenly keenly aware of what people who had never had experience with the supernatural must feel like when it all spills out in front of them. He felt his gorge rise, but it didn’t have much to do with the extreme violence he’d just witnessed. 

Now he could see it. Something walking around in Dean’s skin.

Its posture was different, kind of like the demon he used to be, but with an added edge of casualness. The thing wearing Dean right now had absolutely no doubt it was the strongest, meanest thing on planet Earth, and was confident in its ability to hurt you and tear your reality down without even a passing glance. 

Sam watched as it threw a knife and took down an injured vampire, which was almost immediately eaten by an akephaloi in a shocking display of cannibalism. The worst part was the Mark had probably guessed that would happen. Everything about it screamed monster, and it was unsettling to realize it was his brother, but also, not his brother. It was a curse given form. A grinning, seething sadist.

Was that what it was like on the inside too? Was that what Dean had been fighting this entire time? Sam suddenly didn’t know how he could have. But it did explain the nightmares and lack of sleep. If every time he went to bed, he knew there was a good chance he’d run into that thing, Sam might never sleep again. Of course, he’d already done that with his Lucifer memories, and that hadn’t been great. But Sam understood it. Just like he understood why Dean didn’t want to talk about it. It was bad enough to know there was a monster lurking in your mind, waiting for you. It was worse to know you were trapped inside your skin together, and there was no escape. This was simply your life now. And maybe a friend could sympathize, but they’d never actually understand. How could they? How many people shared their body with a monster?

Sam knew things were bad. But now he understood how desperate it all was. He couldn’t let that monster keep hiding within Dean, waiting to take him over. It wasn’t fair to him, or to the world. It needed to go. Of course, achieving that was another thing entirely. But he absolutely had to. He had to reach into the darkest vaults, dig up something, anything. He had to save Dean before the possibility of doing so was completely gone. 

If it wasn’t too late already.

Sam realized the battle was down to Dean, the akephaloi, who didn’t seem to be much of a threat at the moment, and a female vampire holding up a visibly injured fellow vampire. The thing wearing Dean was closing the distance between them, grinning in a deeply unsettling way that didn’t match his eyes. What was he going to do to her? Sam didn’t want to know. 

Sam pulled out his gun and stepped into the vacant lot. The crunch of dead grass brought Dean’s eyes his way, and they were like glass - empty and shiny and hard. It gazed at him with such open contempt, Sam could almost feel it. It wasn’t Dean. It was something else. Something that would have been happy to kill him by ripping his head off too. “Do you know who’s doing this?” Sam demanded of the female vampire. 

She looked between him and the thing currently possessing Dean with painful confusion. “What? This psychotic motherfucker?”

“No, the person making the summoning sigils, calling these things into town.” Sam gestured to the akephaloi, one of which had managed to pick itself off the ground. The other was still contentedly munching on a vampire. 

The vampire shook her head. She looked like she was in early twenties, but was undoubtedly much older. Her cotton candy blue hair was cut asymmetrically, and while her brother had similarly colored hair, he had a more shaggy hairdo, which was currently covering the wound that was making blood pour out of his head like a faucet. You knew shit was bad when you felt kind of sorry for vampires. “I don’t know. I don’t even know why we came to this hick town.”

“Were you called?” Sam wondered.

She shrugged with her one free hand. The other was holding up her brother. “I dunno. I was just following Luke.”

Sam wondered which of the dead vampires that was. Or was it her brother?

Dean - the thing in Dean - sneered at him. “Are you just gonna talk ‘em to death, hair boy?”

Sam ignored that, and nodded his head towards the akephaloi stumbling towards Dean and the female vampire. “Maybe you wanna take care of that before you become a snack.”

The Dean thing looked, and sighed extravagantly before retrieving a machete. “Stupid fucking things,” he muttered, before attacking the akephaloi. There was no art to it, no subtlety. The Dean thing simply kicked it over, and started hacking at it. Blood, bone, and flesh flew as Dean shredded it, using his inhuman strength to all but crush the skeletal structure of the thing, and Sam watched in abject horror. 

  
He glanced at the female vampire, and he could see that she felt the same way too. Whatever was in Dean’s skin was fucking terrifying. Even the vampire wanted to be anywhere but here. 

Sam wondered if there was any way to get Dean back, or if he was just going to be this way from now on. What did he do then?

He wished he knew. 

 


	7. Bled White

Watching Dean - the thing in Dean - butcher the akephaloi, Sam wondered if there was a single goddamn thing he could do to help him. 

Nothing held the Mark at bay. They’d tried almost everything. Dean pretended everything was fine, but clearly this was a fight he couldn’t win, not on his own. Sam considered Dean’s self-medication, which didn’t seem to keep the Mark back, but he still did it quite a bit. If he could get him drinking, would it help? 

  
Of course, there was also the fact that the air smelled of blood and about three different kinds of death. He needed to get him out of here. Maybe the Mark would subside if there was no violence to be had.

Sam glanced at the one intact akephaloi, which didn’t seem to care about its friend getting killed - maybe? - and then approached the female vampire. She looked at him sidelong, but seemed much more frightened of Dean, for obvious reasons. “Do you want to live?” he whispered.

She looked at him like he was crazy. Which was fair. “Yes, of course I do.”

“We’re not the enemy, then. Agree to help us.”

That look wasn’t going away. Her eyes somehow got wider. “What? Are you crazy?”

“Agree or I leave you to him.”

Yep, that was enough. “Fine, fine. Whatever. Just keep your psycho on a leash. What the hell is he? Possessed?”

“Cursed.”

“By what? The spirit of homicide?”

Sam had to admit, that was highly accurate. “Pretty much.”

That look returned to her pale blue eyes again. The one that said he was the second craziest thing she’d ever seen, with number one being the one chopping the akephaloi into a fine red slurry.

There was a groan somewhere near by, and Sam realized one of the other vampires wasn’t dead. Except no, not a vampire. He had two tiny puncture wounds on his neck. “Did you attack someone?” Sam asked, going to the kid. He was a thin enough you could have slipped him under a door. He couldn’t have had that much blood to lose. 

“He was a bargaining chip. Or he was supposed to be. It was before we realized Mr. Misery over there didn’t bargain.”

Mr. Misery? Was that a play on the Elliott Smith song Miss Misery? Sam imagined it was. No matter what Dean said, he still liked Elliott Smith’s music, depressing or not. Sometimes it was nice to hear your own sorrow reflected back at you. 

Sam checked for a pulse, and it was thready but decent. He probably hadn’t lost too much blood. Sam looked at the woman, and asked, “What’s your name?”

“Bellatrix.”

He scoffed and shook his head. “No it’s not.”

“It is now, all right?”

Sam continued shaking his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand taking on a new name or identity once you were transformed into a new sort of thing, he did, but taking on the name of a Harry Potter villain? Really? “Please tell me his name isn’t Draco,” he said, pointing at the bleeding vampire she was holding up.

She grimaced and looked away. Oh, for fuck’s sake, it was.

“Okay, Bellatrix.” Sam didn’t bother to suppress his eye roll. “You bite anyone else, and I kill you myself.”

Sam supposed the name situation could have been worse. Bella and Edward, maybe? Or Gomez and Morticia. Although, to be perfectly honest, he probably would be very reluctant to kill a Gomez and Morticia vampire, simply for the reference alone. Even though vampires were generally old, they weirdly did not dig very deep in the pop culture reference barrel.

The sudden lack of noise made Sam look back at Dean, who was kneeling in a bloody pile of what had once been an akephaloi. But he seemed oddly still, machete on the ground, unmoving.

Oh shit. What had happened? What had he missed? 

Sam wasn’t sure if this was a good sign or a bad sign.

**

Apparently you really could hurt an akephaloi. You just needed inhuman strength, and a lot of pointless rage. 

It took a lot to cut through one, in spite of that. The blade fractured, a couple inches flew off of it, but the Mark didn’t care. It still had some blade, and was determined to keep going until there was none of it left. 

At a certain point in this carnage, the Mark started to get bored, and that was when Dean made his move.

He knew, at a certain point, he would be unable to do this. He also knew the Mark wanted him to integrate with it, so there would be no separation. He would also being dying slowly there. If he integrated with the Mark, everything that made him him would die. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but Dean wasn’t ready to throw himself on the oblivion pile just yet. He’d thought about it. He knew it was probably inevitable, as the Mark all but insisted. But he knew the moment he made that decision, there’d be no turning back. Dean was well aware will might be the only thing keeping him afloat, and that thought was terrifying. 

It wasn’t a dramatic shift, like it was when the Mark overpowered him. Somehow, when he reclaimed control over his body, it was a gradual affair. He knew it was happening when he could feel the blood soaking into his jeans, and feel the burn of the muscles in his arms, and the Mark on his skin. 

Then came the stench of the broken open akephaloi, which smelled like what he imagined a sewer fire might smell like. He’d have gagged, but he didn’t have that much control yet. 

The Mark haunted his body like he was a house with many skeletons hidden within its walls. It was never completely gone, just lingering in the background. And lately, Dean felt like he was the ghost, and he was quickly forgetting all the reasons not to move on.

The Mark had managed to chop the akephaloi completely in half, and Dean was fully back in control when it was done. He could feel the blood on his face, his hands, soaking into his legs. It was an odd color, blue-black, like squid ink. The machete looked like a jagged tooth, and he tossed it aside, as it was useless now. It was like waking up from a bad dream, except he’d never been asleep, and somehow, he felt more and more like a trespasser in his own body. But it wasn’t just his body anymore, was it? 

“Dean?” Sam asked. He could hear the hesitation in his voice, like he was afraid to poke the bear. 

“Yeah, it’s me,” he told him, standing up. “I guess we confirmed you can hurt an akephaloi, if you’re willing to put your back into it.”

“Or if you’re a complete fucking psycho,” the vampire snapped.

It was fair, but then again, was he actually going to take shit from her? Dean turned and glared at her. “How many people have you killed while you’ve been in town, huh? You keep track? Or shall we pay a visit to your nest and see how many bodies we can find?”

She tried to meet his stare, but couldn’t. “They’re not all ...”

Sam’s eyes widened. “They’re not all dead? Is that what you were going to say?”

She nodded, and Dean decided to press his advantage, because he was fucking pissed off. At losing control, at this vampire giving him attitude, at everything. “How many are still alive?”

“One. Or he was when we left.”

“And why did you keep him alive?” Dean asked. He felt he knew the answer to this, but he wanted her to say it. 

She was staring resolutely down at the ground, like something fascinating was going on down there. “Entertainment.”

He and Sam shared a look, basically  _ do you want to kill her or should I _ . But then Sam frowned, and said, “She’s agreed to help us.”

“Do we need her help?”

She really didn’t like that response. “If somebody’s out here drawing monsters to them, I’ll know. It’s not like you can ask ... whatever the fuck those giant head things are.”

Dean didn’t like it. She was just trying to save her own neck. But considering the look of horror she still gave him, he imagined she was manageable. She thought he was a kill crazy psychopath, and considering he was standing here, covered in some other creature’s blood, she had a damn good point. 

Dingo sat up, as he was on the ground near Sam. He touched his neck, and saw the blood on his fingers. “What the hell ..? Those freaks bit me.” He now saw Sam and somehow got up and jumped back in one movement, which seemed like advanced level coordination, or would have if he’d been at all smooth about it. He wasn’t. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Dingo, it’s okay, he’s my brother.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “Dingo?”

Dean rolled his eyes, and said, “Street name.”

Dingo looked around at all the fallen vampires, the still intact akephaloi, and at Dean dripping with squid ink. His eyes were so wide it looked like they might fall out his skull. “What the everloving fuck ..? Is this a crime scene? Am I at a crime scene right now?”

“Do you remember what happened before you were bitten?”

It seemed to take him a moment, which was fair. He looked a little pale from the blood loss. “Those weird face guys were ... coming after us, I guess. What the fuck is going on?”

Dean pointed to himself and Sam. “We’re monster hunters. You got caught in the middle of a hunt. Sorry.”

Dingo still gazed at him like he was crazy, but the living akephaloi was a hard to detail to overlook. He noticed the blue haired twins, and snapped, “Why the fuck did you bite me?”

The vampire gave him one of the most withering glances Dean had ever seen - well, not personally directed at him by a teenage girl, that is. “We’re vampires, newb.”

“What, that’s your fetish? I know this one guy whose totally into furries -“

With a disgusted sigh, she flashed her teeth at him, and Dingo genuinely jumped back half a foot. “What the fuck..?!”

“Again, monsters are real,” Dean said. “Well, not all of them. But some of them. And these dipshits-“

“Hey!” Vampire girl protested. 

Dean ignored her. ”- moved into that abandoned building you told me about. They made it their nest. They probably ate all the former residents.”

“Not all of them,” she snapped. “Old drunks are gross.”

“And vampires aren’t?” Dean countered. “You drink blood for a living. You fuckers are right next to gross in the dictionary.”

Dingo looked between them all like they were all unstable, and playing a prank on him that could turn lethal any second. “I think I’m gonna pass out. Did somebody slip me some acid earlier?”

Dean wiped off his hand on his left leg, which had a non blood soaked patch on it, and came over, giving Dingo a friendly pat on the back. “You’ll be okay. Just remember to breathe.” Dean was aware he was kind of talking to himself right now. 

One of the worst things in life was losing a battle, but even worse than that, was losing a battle in slow motion. Dean was dying a little bit every day, and he knew, the day he completely lost the battle, he wouldn’t know. That part of himself would just be gone, and he’d be unaware it was missing. If he really thought about it, he wanted to start crying and screaming and breaking every fucking thing in reach. But he wasn’t doing it around any other person, and certainly not Sam. Dean made his bed, so to speak, and he was simply going to have to figure out a way to lie in it. 

Dingo didn’t trust him, but he trusted him a little more than he trusted Sam or the vampire twins - whose names were Bellatrix and Draco, proving that, of the group, Dingo no longer had the stupidest name. 

The abandoned building was absolutely horrific. Some vampires could live in normal places, like normal people, and others lived like they were the touring road company of Caligula, and the Stupid Twins were, no surprise, on the Caligula side of things. They kept the dead bodies in their own separate room, mostly sealed off from the rest, but you could still smell death. 

They found the cheese kid, Colby, still alive, but barely. He was tied to a post with a dog’s choke chain, which must have seemed hilarious to the dead vampires who, quite honestly, deserved every terrible thing the Mark did to them, and probably a bit more as well. 

Colby wasn’t really conscious. His eyes were mostly open, and he could kind of respond, but clearly he was going into shock. He needed an ambulance, but as Dingo pointed out, it would be ages before one came to this part of town, especially at this time of night. Which made perfect, terrible sense to Dean. They needed to get him to a better neighborhood if he had any chance of survival, or simply take him to the E.R. themselves. 

None of this took care of the fact that there was still at least one akephaloi out there, and they were going to need at least one chainsaw to take care of it. They left it happily eating all the vampire bodies, which proved the akephaloi did have a part in the monster food chain, even if they seemed like things dreamed up by a demented child with no sense of anatomy or proportion. 

Dean really didn’t want to leave Bellatrix or her partially lobotomized brother alive, because fuck them. But Sam seemed to think he needed to keep his word to these fuckholes, and besides, maybe they could help. Maybe. Dean let her know she could run if she wanted to, but they would hunt them down. She definitely believed him, but that didn’t really predict what the vampires would do next. 

They left them at the Caligula death pit, and decided to drop Colby off at the emergency room. Dean thought Dingo should go too, get checked out, but Dingo didn’t want to. He wanted them to continue to explain what the fuck was going on. 

So after they dropped off Colby and got the fuck out of there - because there was no way police, besides Jody, were going to accept “vampire chew toy” as a reason for his injuries - they swung by their motel, so Dean could get out of his bloody/inky clothes. He really wanted a shower, or maybe a bath, just to soak this stuff off of him. But he didn’t have time, not at the moment, so he had to mollify himself with a quick face and hand washing. And he was definitely throwing those clothes away. 

After that, they took Dingo to a diner that was still open, and did their best to talk him through accepting that the world was more fucked than he originally thought. Dean was able to get a sandwich down the kid, and felt good about that. 

They made sure he got fluids too, to counter the blood loss, but mostly he seemed kind of lost, as many people were after discovering that not all monsters were human. Just most of them. They also ascertained he was winging as to where he was going to sleep tonight, so they checked him out a room at the motel they were staying at. He didn’t seem to believe they didn’t want anything from him, except for him to be safe. And Dean didn’t blame him for his skepticism, which was healthy, and had probably kept him alive up to this point. They were unable to get a real name or age - if he was nineteen, Dean would eat the Impala’s gear box - but that didn’t matter. As long as Bellatrix and Draco didn’t come back and try and finish the job. A tiny part of him hoped they did, so he could kill them tonight and be done with them. 

As soon as they got the kid settled, Sam followed him back to his room, which Dean had dreaded. He knew what he wanted to talk about, and he didn’t want to talk about it. Sam got into it as soon as he shut the door. “Dean -“

“No.”

Sam raised an eyebrow at that. “No? Why didn’t you tell me how bad the Mark was?”

He scoffed. “What, you didn’t guess?”

“I knew it was bad. But that bad? Dean ...”

He threw his arms out, exasperated. “What? It’s a monster. What do you expect?”

Sam had that tense jaw thing going now, which told you he was pissed but trying to rein it in. “It’s a curse that seems to have more baggage than we thought. And you knew that, and didn’t tell me. I thought we were beyond this shit.”

Dean couldn’t tell him how he felt about this, because there was no point. This wasn’t misery they could share. Sam could do nothing to help him or make it better. But Dean almost didn’t trust himself to say it, because he was so angry, and so despairing. The one thing Dean didn’t want to die was as a thing he had to hunt. But that was exactly what was going to happen. And the damage he could do. Cain was bad enough. Dean wondered how large a bloody swath he could cut through the Earth. The one good thing about fucking around with Crowley when he was a demon was it kept him from really unleashing any violence. It was manageable, but mainly because he was having too much fun indulging vices. Next time, the world wouldn’t be so lucky. “I took this on, Sam. I have to deal with the consequences.”

“Not alone you don’t.”

“Yes alone,” he snapped, and had to pull back his own anger. “You can’t help me. No one can. I’m trapped alone with this thing, and I have to figure out a way to deal with that.”

“Was that what that was tonight? You dealing with it?”

Dean scowled, and felt the dark tide of the Mark surge.  _ Teach him a lesson. Show that ungrateful brat exactly what you’ve spared him from.  _ Dean ignored it. “Yeah, it was. Now that this thing has gotten some of its rage out, maybe I can actually get some fucking sleep for once.” 

Sam’s own anger seemed to crumble at this admission, and Dean didn’t know if he said it for that very reason or not. He would like some sleep without nightmares about killing the world. He didn’t know if he’d ever have it again. “Look, I know ... okay, no, I don’t know. But don’t keep me out. You don’t have to suffer all by yourself, okay? Because trust me, you’re not.”

Dean nodded, while he could feel that surge again from the Mark, as if reiterating Sam’s point that he was never alone, not anymore. No matter how much he wished he could be. Dean pulled out the whiskey bottle he’d bought before heading out on his nighttime excursion, and said, “Fine. If you don’t mind, I’m going to drink myself into a mild coma.”

Sam’s disapproving look said it all, but he didn’t dare say a word. He’d seen the monster. He probably needed a couple belts himself to get to sleep. “Try not to overindulge too much. We have a lot of work tomorrow.”

“When don’t we?”

Sam looked like he wanted to say something else, but he seemed to have second thoughts, and left without saying another word. Dean was glad.

He didn’t bother with a glass, he swigged straight from the bottle, and took it with him into the bathroom, as there was no rule saying you couldn’t wash akephaloi blood off you and get hammered at the same time. Or at least try and get hammered. As much as the Mark would allow. 

Another good thing about drinking in the shower? You could get as weepy as you wanted, and no one could hear you. Actually, that was the best part. 


	8. Crooked Teeth

Despite being exhausted on every possible level, Sam didn’t get a lot of sleep. He tried to sleep despite the nightmares, but the last one, about the thing inside Dean going on a rampage, woke him up for good. At least by then, the sun had come up, and he could say he was just getting a jump on the day. 

While in the shower, Sam had an idea. What if they recreated the summoning sigil in a controlled area? They could lure in the akephaloi, couldn’t they? And Dean could have his chainsaw, so they could take care of it, and at least get those beasts off the table. As for the rest of them ... well, that was a separate battle. 

  
When Sam left his room to go get coffee, he almost ran into Dingo, who had the bruised crescents beneath his eyes that suggested he hadn’t gotten any sleep either. He was restless and a bit fidgety, nervous about the fact that there were real monsters and he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. Sam invited him to get coffee with him, and the kid agreed, glad to have something concrete to focus on.

Sam had so many questions, such as where had Dean encountered a probably underage male prostitute, and why was he pulled into this, but Sam had to admit it was simply a symptom of one of Dean’s most unexpected and best traits. He saw the humanity in everyone. 

There had been some on display last night, when Dean came to the defense of the homeless men the vampires had killed. It didn’t matter to Dean if you were a sex worker, a junkie, a prisoner, a runaway, a dealer - he didn’t care. You were human, and that was enough. As Sam had learned when Dean talked him into that stupid - but ultimately correct - trip to the haunted prison, he didn’t give a shit what society thought of you. Dean thought you were like everyone else, no matter what. It was beautiful, honestly, and shamed Sam a little, because he thought he was better than the prisoners, didn’t he? And he had these moments when he couldn’t believe Dean was giving the benefit of the doubt to an obvious junkie, or someone who was clearly off their meds. And he was wrong, and he checked himself. Because Dean was right. They were all people, and they were all engaged in the same battle. Considering Dean came off as a swaggering macho meathead a lot of the time, it was easy to forget he had one of the softest hearts. As long as you didn’t hurt anyone else, he didn’t judge how you made it through another day. He was his big, sappy brother. Which made the fact of that thing inside him, the Mark, all the worse. 

In the relentless light of day, it was easy to see how young Dingo was, and you could see scars on his face too, washed out but there. He had a scar on his lip very similar to one Dean used to have, which he got from taking a pummeling from a ghoul. Signs of abuse? Probably, and that made Sam’s stomach burn. If there were kids on the street, they were either being trafficked, or had run from a situation even worse than their current one. Usually, in kids this young, drug abuse was a symptom of a bigger problem, not the problem itself. Jody had to know of some resources that would help. They couldn’t leave this kid out there, and knowing Dean, he would insist they didn’t. 

He ordered a fancy coffee drink that was probably two thirds sugar and one third caffeine, but Sam was so tired he figured fuck it, and ordered one for the kid and Dean as well. Sam was glad he did, because not only did it wake him up, it was fucking delicious. Sam also knew it was probably a million calories, but he didn’t care. He’d care when he was more awake.

The caffeine and sugar made Dingo chatty, to the point where he revealed his actual name was Ramon, and he’d ended up here randomly, as he took a bus from Texas, and went as far as he could afford. He didn’t say why he’d run away from home, but an oblique reference to his step-father and the scars on his face were all Sam needed to connect the dots. 

He also asked a lot about monsters, which was expected. Sam reassured him he wasn’t going to turn into a vampire, and did his best to explain what the akephaloi were, although he wasn’t clear on many aspects of it. Ramon seemed scared to go out there again, and Sam told him he didn’t have to. As long as they were in town, he had that room at the motel, and if he wanted to get off the street, they knew people who could help. He seemed worried that if he got help he’d have to go back to his parents - which confirmed he was under eighteen - but Sam assured him that was something they could work around. They were good at those kinds of work arounds. And both he and Dean would be damned if they sent some kid back to his abusive parents. Hell, Sam might have to stop Dean from paying them a very scary late night visit. He had a very special, very personal hatred of parents who were shitty to their kids. 

Ramon was really bothered by the fact that there were no strings attached. There had to be some, and the lack of them was making him very anxious. Which was fair. If life had always been a negotiation for you, you didn’t know what life was like without one. Sam told him the only stipulation was he needed to stay out of trouble and maybe not work for now. Sam found it incredibly hard to even think about his job, because for Christ’s sake, it was clear that he was a kid. No matter how he tried to bluff, he was clearly a child, and anyone who picked him up was a sick motherfucker. And there had probably been lots, which was the other sad end of that equation. 

By the time they got back to the motel, Dean was rummaging through the trunk of the Impala, apparently doing a weapons check. He was hoping, rather than a chainsaw, he could try out the grenade launcher on the akephaloi, which might work. He didn’t look any more rested than yesterday, but he didn’t look wrecked by a hangover either. Sam wasn't sure if that was a good sign or a very bad one. 

Ramon’s jaw dropped when he saw the weapons cache, and said, “Holy shit! You sure you guys aren’t arms dealers, or survivalist nutjobs or something?”

“You know, I’m more offended at the thought we’re arms dealers,” Dean said. Sam nodded, because he was too. He handed Dean his coffee, and he looked at it funny. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s a mocha caramel almond something or other. You’ll love it.”

“Since when?” Dean protested. 

“Try it.” He almost added  _ I dare you _ , but that seemed implicit. 

Still giving him a skeptical look, he took a sip, and Sam saw his eyes light up. “Holy shit.”

“See? I told you.”

“You had one of these? These gotta be a million calories. Does that mean you’re swearing off eating for the rest of the week?”

“Very funny.”

Dean gave him a snarky smirk before going back to drink his super sweet, frou-frou coffee drink, which was everything he hated and secretly loved at once. 

Ramon was continuing to gawk at all the weapons. “You know how to use all these?”

“We’d better,” Dean said. “Never pick up a weapon you don’t know how to use. That’ll get you killed quick.”

“And you kill monsters with all of these?”

“Depends on the monster.”

Damon suddenly looked across the lot, and stiffened. “Oh shit. Po-po.”

Both Sam and Dean reflexively looked, Dean automatically shutting the trunk, but they recognized the officer behind the wheel. “Don’t worry,” Sam said. “It’s a friend-“

But Ramon was already gone, closing the door of his room quietly but firmly. 

“Don’t blame him,” Dean said. “It’s habit after a while.”

It was super weird to think, in another life, Dean would have made a great social worker, but he would have. He just have to set aside all the fighting and hunting, which would never happen on this Earth. 

And Sam still liked to think, in that alternate universe, he would have made a damn good lawyer. Or at least a pretty good one.

**

Jody wondered if she should take a picture of this on her phone. Sam and Dean, standing in the parking lot of a motel, looking as innocent as you could want. Especially when you knew they were guilty of so many things, it swung right around tragic and became funny again. She’d seen them close the trunk, and knew they had stuff in there that wasn’t legal in any state. But you weren’t supposed to be hunting demons either, so the law was frustratingly gray here.

She parked in the first open slot and got out, still wondering if she should be mad at them or not. “Hey boys. So, were you ever going to tell me there were vampires in the area?”

“We were going to do that today, I swear,” Sam said. She wasn’t sure if she believed him or not.

“We didn’t forget, it was just a crazy night,” Dean said. That sounded true. But Jody wasn’t sure she believed him, because Dean could be an expert level liar when he wanted to be. 

Jody leaned against her truck, and said, “Let me guess. You were shooting at something over on Holland and 24 th , and along the way, found a vamp’s nest, and a victim? Because Juan told me a couple of handsome guys dropped off a kid they said they found in the street, who was covered with all kinds of bite marks, and they disappeared before anyone could get a decent story out of them.”

Dean smiled. “Handsome.”

Jody glared at him. “They're saying it was an animal attack, but I know vampire bites when I see them. So story - now.”

Dean looked appropriately cowed, hands folded in front of him. “I was searching for the akephaloi, I found them, and then some vampires who had set up shop in a nearby factory decided to see what all the shooting was about. There was a fight, and we think one of the akephaloi is dead, and all the vampires but two.”

“The kid we brought in, is he okay?” Sam asked.

She nodded. “Lots of blood loss, but they expect him to pull through. He hasn’t been conscious in any meaningful way, and he had no I.D. on him. Know who he is?”

“A street kid called Colby,” Dean said with a shrug. “All we know.”

Jody had figured as much. He matched no existing juvenile officially listed as missing, and vampires seemed to like to prey on the extremely vulnerable. But she didn’t like vampires even being in the same city as Alex. Hell, if there was a button that would kill all vampires everywhere, she would happily press it. “Now what about the two living vampires, and the maybe dead akephaloi? How are you not sure its dead? It is or it isn’t.”

“It’s our best guess that it is,” Sam replied. “But this is a new monster to us, and we’re winging it. Considering it was all but crushed into a fine powder, we honestly do think it’s most likely dead. We intend to try and get rid of the other one today.”

Jody had been immersed in the hunter world long enough that she kind of didn’t want to know, but also, she kind of had to know. “How did you kill it?”

The look Sam and Dean shared immediately sent her mind to terrible places. What had they done? They also seemed to be silently daring the other to say it, and Dean finally bit the bullet. “The Mark ... came out.”

“What does that mean?” The looks on their faces. It was like someone had died, and not just the akephaloi. “I don’t want to know what that means, do I?”

Dean shook his head. “No, you don’t.”

Okay. So that weird mark on his arm, which looked like a brand burned in his skin, could somehow come out, and, if she was allowed to guess, engage in extreme violence. Fantastic. No wonder they seemed reluctant to talk about the curse Dean had somehow managed to catch. “Is this a problem?”

Sam looked like he didn’t know how to answer that, but Dean said, “No, it’s not. I promise you, I wouldn’t bring that here.”

But if that was completely true, would it have come out? Still, that wasn’t why she was here. It was just a potential problem she’d have to back burner for now. “Why are those two vampires still alive?”

“It’s a temporary situation,” Dean said. “One of them is pretty seriously injured, and isn’t a threat, and the second one is a poser. She talks a big game, but I don’t think she has much to offer.”

“We’re hoping to use her to lead us to whoever’s throwing up summoning sigils around town,” Sam added. 

“Why would she help you?”

“She’s terrified of Dean,” Sam said. 

“Oh, she saw you eat a cheeseburger?” Jody asked. Dean made a sarcastic face at her joke, but Sam seemed to enjoy it. “Do I assume she doesn’t have much life after that, or is at the very least, run out of town on a stake?”

“As good as gone,” Dean assured her.

She nodded. “Good. And next time you decide to have a midnight shoot out in my town, how about a head’s up, huh? I’m not here for decoration. I’m a hunter as well as the law, and people owe me favors all over the place. If there are monsters that need dispatching, I want in.”

“Yes ma’am,” Dean said primly. 

Sam took a step towards her, and asked, “Can I talk to you in private for a moment?”

That was curious. Even Dean looked like he had no idea what this was about. Jody gestured at her truck, and said, “Step into my office.” She returned to the driver’s seat, and Sam got in on the passenger side. He was probably accustomed to that by now. 

As soon as the doors were shut, Sam launched into it. “We were led to the vampires by another street kid, who needs some help. But there are problems.”

Okay, now Jody knew where this was going. “Underage and a runaway?”

Sam nodded. “He didn’t go into too many details, but there’s ample evidence to suggest he had a good reason for leaving.”

Jody sighed. She’d heard this story way too many times. She honestly thought life would be a lot better for everyone if people had to get a license to be parents. They had to prove they could love something else, and not beat the shit out of it, starve it, or do any of a hundred different awful, fucked up things to it before you could have one. For fuck’s sake, if you wanted to adopt an animal from the shelter, there were rules and paperwork you had to fill out before you could take a pet home. Not so for having a kid or parenting one, which any idiot could do, or so they thought. Jody could prove otherwise. “And you believe him?”

“I do. And I think he's ready to get off the street. But he's really afraid of cops.”

She nodded. That was par for the course as well. “I don’t suppose he's involved in the sex trade, are he?”

“Looks like it.”

“Okay. I know a woman who runs a sort of halfway house for kids who have been trafficked and can’t or shouldn’t go home. I’ll give her a call.”

Sam looked a bit confused. “Shouldn’t?”

She almost hated to tell him. Oh, to be that clueless. “Who do you think trafficked them in the first place?”

He sighed, and looked out the windshield with a grimace. “Christ.”

“Yeah. ” This seemed like a heavy thing to leave on, so she told him, “You know, I’ve worked with a few hunters now, and you two are the only ones to consistently give me strays.”

“Saving people is part of the job.”

“Still, it says something about you two. I don’t know what, but when I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

That made Sam smile, but when he looked out at Dean, leaning casually against the closed trunk full of illegal weaponry, drinking his coffee, his expression collapsed into worry. Jody wanted to tell him something reassuring, but she had nothing for him. She didn’t know what it was Dean was cursed with exactly, and she didn’t know how to help. “Anything I can do?”

Sam shook his head, and was probably about to say more, when her radio crackled to life. “Chief, you there?” Rico asked. 

She picked up the handset and thumbed it on. “Where else would I be?”

“Yeah. So, um, we got this weird call at the station? And at first I thought it was a hoax, but several different people have called it in now, and I’m thinkin’ there may be somethin’ to it-“

“Get to the point, Rico.”

“Okay, so, you know the Sullivan Insurance building? People are saying there are a bunch of wild dogs, and some weird people, running through the building.”

She exchanged a look with Sam. That could be nothing but a prank, or that could be very bad. “What do you mean by weird people?”

“Uh, that’s not really clear. Some callers are saying they’re, like, half-dog, which is crazy. Maybe some cosplayers who got into some bad Chipotle?”

This was alarming. “I’m on it. Tell Jackson and Bennett to close off the street until further notice. No one else in or out unless I okay it.”

“Um, what?”

“You heard me, Rico. Get it done.” Once she put the radio receiver back in the cradle, she said, “Werewolves?”

Sam nodded, opening the door. “Werewolves.” He stepped out of the truck, and told Dean, “We have a werewolf attack going on right now in a public building.”

Dean, who had been clearly been off in a happy place with his coffee, suddenly looked appropriately alarmed. “What? Is it even a full moon?”

”Nope. Wanna bet our sigil maker is upping his game?” Sam looked at her before closing the door. “You got silver bullets?”

“Oh yeah. Got an emergency hunter’s kit under the seat.” Silver, salt, holy water - as much of the full nine yards she could cram in there.

 

He nodded. “Just let us know if you need more.” Sam shut the door, and went to the Impala. Dean was already in the driver’s seat, waiting for him. 

What a great morning. First there were the reports on all the mayhem the Winchesters had gotten up to last night, and now there was a blatant daylight attack on civilians by werewolves who were using the wrong lunar calendar. 

If she found this sigil maker before the Winchesters, she was going to kill him. 

 


	9. Gravewax

In theory, this sounded fun.

Werewolves running loose in an office building? Hell yes, sign him up for that. Like laser tag, but with werewolves and live ammunition. This felt like an idea that Dean could sell. 

But, objectively, he knew it was terrible. Seriously, how many werewolves were they talking about, and how many civilians? Could the building be evacuated? Was it too late? Were the werewolves killing, turning, or both? What was their objective, beyond bloodshed? Had sigil guy upped his game so much, he was imposing his will on them? If that was the case, things had taken a turn for the motherfucking worst. 

Was this the start of his army? Were the werewolves the vanguard? 

“On a scale from fucked to smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, where do you think we are?” Dean asked.

Sam was quickly switching his bullets from regular to silver. Dean had a pre-loaded clip of silver bullets, which he had done by hand. All six of them. Which was a boring job - hell, making silver bullets wasn’t a thrill a minute either - but it was perfect for times like these, when monsters showed up when you weren’t expecting them. 

“You can’t make up your own scale like that.”

“Says who?”

Although Dean didn’t know where said building was, all he had to do was follow Jody, who had lights and sirens blaring. He followed her close, and felt like he had a police escort, which was kind of nice for once. Although the circumstances weren’t. “Do I wanna know what you were talking to her about?”

“Just getting some help for Ramon.”

Dean racked his brain, but no, he couldn’t recall anyone with that name. “Who’s Ramon?”

“Dingo.”

“Oh.” Dingo hadn’t looked like a Ramon. Dean thought he looked more like a Jordan or a Chris. If anyone could be said to look like either name. 

It didn’t take long to reach the building, which may have been the tallest in Sioux Falls, which was a sign of how terrible this was going to be. The cops had cordoned off the street and sidewalk at both ends, which was great, as at least it limited the casualties. There were ambulances standing by as well, but no one was making a move on the building, as they were waiting for the Sheriff. 

They got through the cordon, thanks to Jody, who gave them the nod, and when Dean pulled up the curb, he saw the fresh graffiti on the side of the building. It looked like the summoning sigil they’d found in the abandoned house development, only there were added embellishments now, including something that looked like a crescent moon, and parallel lines that could have been claw marks. It especially stood out since the paint was red. “Think drawing a line through it with spray paint will make it useless?”

Sam saw it, putting his gun away, and frowned. “We can try. But sigils are more like spells than anything else. Once they’ve been cast, they’re pretty much impossible to reel back.”

“Let’s try it anyways. Can’t hurt.”

While Jody was giving her troops marching orders, Dean got a can of spray paint out of the trunk, and put a line across the sigil. He was tempted to deface it with the more direct, “Fuck you,” but he was sure Jody was telling her people they were Feds, and how could he explain that? It would be hard enough explaining the initial mark. Maybe he could say they ripped him off?

He’d thrown the can back in the car by the time Jody approached, carrying a shotgun. “Okay, I told everyone the three of us were going to go ahead and assess the situation before they’d come in. They think I’m nuts.”

“Is that new?” Dean wondered.

She gave him a gimlet eyed look, which was fair, then admitted, “Not really. I still don’t appreciate the sass, Agent.” She hit the agent hard. He had to watch himself. 

“Any idea of the numbers we’re dealing with?” Sam asked.

“Civilians? Unknown. As for dogs or weird dog people, the numbers vary from a couple to a dozen.”

“Shit,” Sam said, under his breath, as he looked up at the building. Not a skyscraper by any means, but it had to have at least ten floors. “How are we going to do this?”

“We’d cover more ground if we split up,” Jody said. 

  
Dean nodded, but frowned as he thought about it. “Yes, but we’d leave ourselves vulnerable to a group attack. We can all defend ourselves against a couple werewolves. What if it’s five or six? We won’t save anyone if we’re torn to pieces.”

Jody raised an eyebrow at that, but didn’t argue. “So what’s the play here? Slow and steady, or hell bent for leather?”

“Well, you know I’m naturally tending towards hell bent,” Dean admitted. “But I think we stay together as a group until we get an idea of how many wolves we’re dealing with, and where the people are.”

“And how many,” Sam added. 

Together seemed like the wisest strategy, at least to start with. It was so weird to walk into the lobby of an office building and find it empty, save for the large smear of blood that stretched half way across the floor. From there, there were bloody paw prints heading off. 

It was completely creepy, but it begged a question. “If the wolves can’t take the elevator or open the door to the stairwell, how did they get upstairs?” Dean whispered. It seemed like whispering was called for.

Both Jody and Sam seemed stumped by this, and looked around. After a moment, Sam said, “I guess one of the still mostly human ones opened the door for them.”

That was probably the only possible answer. It still seemed weird.

Speaking of weird, the Mark gave off an odd sort of pulse in his arm. Reacting to the sigil maybe? Considering it seemed to be specifically aimed at werewolves you wouldn’t think so, but now it felt itchy, and that was kind of strange. Dean ignored it as best he could. 

Jody took the lead, because she was the actual cop, and they took the elevator to the second floor, where supposedly ten people had barricaded themselves in a conference room. The hope was to get them out without attracting too much attention from whatever was around. The likelihood of accomplishing that felt like fifty-fifty.

In the elevator up they got ready to fire as soon as the door slid open - and it seemed to open as slowly as possible - but nothing greeted them but a bland hallway, with a dominant beige and white color scheme. The only sign that something was amiss was a potted plant had been knocked over, and there was a lone file in the middle of the hallway. It was so quiet, you could hear the wheeze of the air conditioning system.

This was a million kinds of wrong, but they had no choice but to continue onwards. Jody took point, Sam took the middle, and Dean covered everyone’s six. They walked as a group down the hall, all looking in different directions, and to Dean’s horror, he saw this was one of those “open office” sort of places, which meant cubicles everywhere. Not only was that aesthetically a disaster, but it kept all clear lines of sight obscured. A wolf or part wolf could be in any one of those cubicles, and they wouldn’t know it until they charged them. 

The conference room was easy to find, as it had a glass wall on one side. It was frosted to about waist height, so they glanced in and saw that the people inside had barricaded the door with furniture, and they seemed to have all gotten down on the floor, as if there was an active shooter running around. They all saw each other through the glass, and the fear was obvious, but when they saw Jody’s police jacket, they relaxed, and started pulling stuff away from the door. Dean noticed some cracked glass near the floor, and it looked like there was blood and tufts of fur in the cracks. What had happened here? Had a wolf thrown itself at the glass?

Once the door opened, Jody put a finger to her lips, shushing the corporate crowd, and whispered as loudly as possible under the circumstances, “Leave quietly. If anyone has any relevant info to tell me about numbers of wolves or where other survivors are, tell me in the elevator.”

As the suits started filtering out, Sam took point, and Dean took the center position, with Jody taking up the six. The suits were looking at him and Sam funny, but after his initial annoyance, Dean realized it was probably fair. They were wearing their normal clothes, not their Fed monkey suits, and they were clearly not cops. They looked like a couple of armed locals who got bum-rushed into being back up. Dean would probably look at them funny too. 

As they were still getting this group of people out of the room, Dean heard a strange noise. It was like claws skidding on a wood floor, and he knew that shit was about to get fucked up. “Here they come,” he said, for Sam and Jody.

Like Dean feared, they came from all over, from every direction. The wolves were big, and some had muzzles dripping with fresh blood. Dean now realized his fears about the cubicles were correct, and multiplied by the fact that the werewolves had been smart enough to hide and wait for someone to come along and free all that nice human food from the cage it was barricaded in. They absolutely didn’t need smart werewolves on top of everything else. 

“Stay together,” Sam snapped, trying to keep the corporate horde from breaking and making a suicidal run for the elevators. They didn’t seem to realize they were safer in a group, and safer behind the three of them than anywhere else. 

It was basically a shooting gallery. Everybody who had a shot took it, and they managed to get the first wave of werewolves before they could close the distance. They made several mistakes, such as leaping for throats, which made shooting them in the heart really easy. But in some respects they showed more intelligence than Dean was used to from werewolves, as ones from the back tried to attack while they were shooting the ones in front. Might have worked if he and Sam couldn’t have done this in their sleep, and Jody too for that matter. 

More werewolves appeared and hung back in the shadows of cubicles, so trying to put a silver bullet in their chests was near impossible. Dean wondered what they were waiting for, and realized that was it - they were waiting. 

“Go now, now!” Dean shouted, taking a couple steps forward, so he was between the wolves on the left and the people now stampeding for the elevators. 

Sam joined him, but stood behind him, covering wolves on the right. “What is it?”

“This was phase one.”

“What?”

Jody herded all the executives into the elevator, and said, “When you get to the ground floor, run like hell.” She slapped the door closed button, and walked back to join them. “What the fuck do you mean it’s phase one, Winchester?”

“Werewolf packs don’t act like this. This stinks of pre-meditation.”

“Are werewolves capable of that?” Jody asked.

“No,” Sam said. “Not usually.”

“So the sigils are all about mind and body control? Seems like that would take some major mojo to work them.” Dean kind of hated to say it, he didn’t want to get in an argument with Sam now, but he still felt he needed to say it. 

  
“Not necessarily,” Sam said. “But it must have a major power source.” Sam’s voice went down a little at the end, as it did when he realized something. 

“What kind of power source? Are we talk actual power, or mystic mumbo jumbo bullshit that gives me a headache?”

“Mumbo jumbo bullshit,” Dean said, trying not to smile. Jody was the fucking best. “What did you figure out, Sam?”

He didn’t have time to tell him, because what they had been waiting for arrived. Dean wished it had been good news, but how could it have been? 

The half-wolves had arrived. 

They were human from the waist down, and wolf from the waist up, which was fucking ludicrouss. Also, it looked really painful, or maybe Dean was projecting, because they made these horrible noises, that were half-howl and half-scream. Their backs were hunched up, their shoulders ridiculously broad, in some cases easily twice the circumference of their waists. Fur rippled along their arms and necks, covered their heads, which didn’t hide the fact that some of them had only partially transformed faces. Some had full wolf muzzles; some had this weird half grown thing, that looked like part of their face had been chopped off. Some still had human eyes, which was worse. Dean searched for a glimmer of intelligence, hoping maybe he could talk these people out of whatever they were planning to do, but all he saw was animal pain. 

“Oh my god,” Jody said. “This is so fucked up.”

“I guess we’re mercy killing them,” Dean said, shooting one in the chest. And he felt a cold shock of horror as it stayed on its feet, coming for them.

He shot again, this time trying to imagine how malformed their hearts were. “May need to take a couple shots. Looks like their hearts got mutated too.”

Now the regular wolves still left attacked in concert with the half wolves, and it was much more successful. They had to keep changing focus, from the leaping wolves to the lumbering ones. You had to aim fast and shoot even faster. And the lumbering ones sometimes took up to three shots to put down. 

They were making genuine headway, as you could see from the blood that now stained the carpet a dark, unpleasant hue, and all the crimson splatter that added color to the boring walls. But then Sam picked the worst time to run out of bullets. “Shit,” Sam snapped, and because they were back to back, Dean felt him pull out a silver knife.

Nope. Dean grabbed Sam by the arm, and said, “Switch.” Before Sam knew what was happening, Dean hauled him around, until he was in Dean’s place, and Dean was in his place. Just in time for a lumbering one to swipe at him with his claws. 

It caught Dean’s coat, but he fired two quick shots into its chest, making it drop. A full werewolf lunged for him, and he kicked it right in the face. Normally, that wouldn’t do much, but Dean was wearing his steel toed boots today, and the werewolf went flying backwards. It had gotten back on its feet when Dean put a bullet in its heart. 

“Holy fuck buckets,” Jody exclaimed, in what was an excellently creative use of swearing. Dean had his gun ready, a fresh clip of silver bullets slapped in, when he saw what had made her curse.

It was a half-werewolf in a bulletproof vest. 

“Jenkins?” Jody asked. He was still wearing police pants, and part of a cop’s shirt, but it had apparently been mostly demolished when his werewolf torso filled out, and hung off him like a tattered rag cape. Not the vest, though, which was clinging on for its Velcro-ed life.

“One of yours?” Sam asked. 

“He was one of the first responders,” Jody reported. She looked both dumbfounded and pissed off. “I didn’t know he was a fucking werewolf.”

He was lumbering towards them on unsteady feet, snarling, blood and saliva dripping from his truncated muzzle.

There were guns that could punch through bulletproof vests like they were made of toilet paper, but those were usually big hardware, fully automatic shit or truly vicious ammo that they didn’t bother with. Sure, you could shoot fifty bullets a second, but you could only shoot for maybe half a minute before you were out of ammo. Also, they weren’t precision weapons; it was a bit like taking a machete to a bris. Bigger wasn’t always better. 

“Jenkins!” Jody snapped. “Stand down.” There was no reaction from the half wolf, which closed the distance. “Okay, how the hell do we kill him?”

That was an excellent question. Dean hoped they figured it out before they became puppy chow. 


	10. Man the Ramparts

The only idea Dean had was terrible. He kept trying to think of something else, but his mind kept circling back to this one stupid idea. It was way too dangerous, and risky, and for what? “I have an idea,” Dean admitted. “But it sucks.”

“Thanks for the newsflash,” Jody said. “What is it?”

“I gotta go hand to hand with this thing. I can either stab it through the vest, or get the vest off, and you guys can shoot it.”

“Hand to hand? With a werewolf?” Sam exclaimed. “Why don’t you just shoot yourself in the head? Again.”

“What?” Jody asked. 

“That’s a story for later,” Dean admitted. “Does anyone else have a better idea?”

The silence was answer enough. They were forced to back up, because Jenkins was getting too close. Dean holstered his gun and pulled out his own silver knife, getting psyched up to do this stupid, stupid thing, when there was a howl from upstairs.

It was impossible to say how far upstairs, as the sound was muffled, and probably only traveling through the vents and the elevator shaft, but it was quickly joined by more, and even Jenkins, who let out a weird scream-howl that made Dean jump. Jenkins then turned and ran off. “Hey!” Dean snapped, darting after him. He had no idea the half wolves could even move fast, because none of them had so far. 

That led to an answer for one question they had. Jenkins had disappeared through the broken emergency stairwell door. “Did anyone see a broken door downstairs?” It looked like it had been kicked in. The bottom third of it was scattered all over the floor. 

Sam and Jody joined him, and Jody sighed, seeing the broken door, and the blood smeared on the floor. “Okay, this is a shitshow. If we have to fight floor by floor, we’re gonna run out of bullets by level three, and be dead by ... floor four? That seems optimistic. We need a new plan.”

Dean nodded, because she was right. But he had no ideas whatsoever. Maybe ... pump gas through the air vents? Could you knock out werewolves? He was pretty sure Dad’s journal had no notes about that. You’d think enough of it would knock them out ... but what about the people? A werewolf dose would kill them, wouldn’t it? Shit.

“Fight fire with fire,” Sam said.

He shared a look with Jody before turning his gaze to Sam. “While I like the idea of setting the building on fire, I don’t think-“

“No, I mean we use the summoning sigil to bring the monsters to us. Clear them out of the building.”

“Would that work?” Jody asked, looking dubious. 

Dean thought about it, and now it was his turn to sigh. “You know what’s powering it, right? How do we manage that?”

“Okay, I haven’t worked out all the details yet -“

“Time out,” Jody said. “What did you just skip past?”

Dean glared daggers at Sam until he relented. “Fine. The sigils are being powered by blood sacrifice.”

Jody’s eyebrows seemed to reach her hairline. “Say what now?”

“It’s a power loop,” Sam explained. “To start doing this, I imagine he killed someone. But ever since, the monsters he’s been summoning have been killing enough to power the next. Which is why his targets for violence keep getting bigger.”

“Hence the daylight attack on an office building,” Dean said, following Sam’s logic train. “It’s fucking ridiculous, and do you really want supernatural creatures appearing on the six o’clock news? But he was counting on high casualties -“

”- to power his next attack,” Jody said, finishing the thought. “So his end game is what? Slaughtering the whole city?”

Sam shrugged, and Dean shook his head. It didn’t feel right. Which was a shitty thing to go on, but Dean was hoping his hunter instincts counted for something. “It’s hard to say at this point,” Sam said. 

“I mean, I get the idea, but I’m not letting you kill someone to get the monsters out of this building,” Jody said, running a hand through her hair. “Unless it’s a werewolf, then, fair game I suppose.”

“What if we don’t need to kill anyone?” Dean said. He remembered what happened last night, when the vampire tried to make a snack out of him. Sam gave him a quizzical look. “What if your blood is full of dark magic to begin with?”

It took him a moment, but he finally saw understanding bloom in Sam’s eyes. “Dean, we don’t know-“

“I know,” he replied. “We use my blood, and I bet those things will come running. Monster calls to monsters.”

  
“Dean-“

“Brother drama aside,” Jody interrupted. “Where do we do this? If this works, we’re gonna be facing a wave of seemingly crazed wolves. We’ll be saving the people trapped in here, but we’re endangering everyone else out there.”

Yeah. Assuming it worked, they were releasing werewolves and half-wolves on the city. The cops might have this street closed, but it was a single block. They were essentially wild animals, and would attack the first moving thing in their vision. It wasn’t ideal. Dean tried to view it as a tactical problem with a solution, if he could at all find it. If this was his personal Kobayashi Maru, then he was going to have to cheat to solve it. “Is there any empty, secured building on this block we could use as a werewolf holding pen?”

Jody looked like she was about to break out her police baton and start hitting him with it. “You think we can contain them? We don’t even know how many we’re dealing with.”

“I know. But is there any chance there’s a sort of empty building we can maybe secure them in?”

Jody considered that with a scowl, scratching her head. After a few long seconds, she said, “Not on this block. But next block over? There’s a fitness center that hasn’t opened yet. It’s huge, and if we could get the wolves in there, we might be able to lock them in. Assuming there’s less than seventy or so. More and we have a problem.”

Dean suddenly had what felt like a brilliant idea. “Does it have a pool?”

Jody shrugged. “Probably. Why? This isn’t the time water polo.”

“If it’s empty, we can trap them in there,” Dean explained. “Wolves will be unable to climb the sides. I don’t know about the half werewolves, but we can’t worry about them too much.”

Sam grimaced, but finally said, “Okay, that might work. But that’s a long way to herd werewolves.”

“So we get a rabbit to keep them going in one direction.”

Sam now glared at him. “Dean, no.”

“I’m the only one who can do this,” he pointed out. “If a werewolf gets me, the Mark’s coming out. What are you gonna put your money on? The Mark or the wolf?”

Sam continued scowling at him, because he didn’t have a counterpoint. It didn’t matter how many fucking werewolves were thrown at him, because the Mark would win. The Mark always won. That was the crux of their problem.

So, they had a plan. A shitty plan with many holes, but those were their specialties.

Jody told her people to make sure everybody was off the street or barricaded inside their buildings for now, and as soon as they got the message out, to shut themselves in their cars and wait for her to give them the all clear. They had many questions, but she was the boss and answered none of them. She simply told them to get it done. 

Jody then walked them over to the fitness center. Dean had to pick the lock, but it was easy, because whoever was in charge of security for this place was super lazy. Inside, the construction was done, but it was maybe a week or two from opening; the place still had an overwhelming scent of paint. 

And hot damn. There were several pools, and all of them were empty. 

Sam found an empty paint pan, stained blue, to use as a receptacle, and Dean cut his hand and bled into it, until he felt he had enough to draw the sigil. They set up a painter’s ladder to reach the deepest end of the biggest pool, which is where Sam decided to draw the sigil. He was still making a grumpy face, but Dean really didn’t care that he didn’t like this plan. Dean honestly didn’t like playing out the string out on this The Raid scenario, but with werewolves. Which sounded cool in theory, but in practice was kind of unwinnable, unless you dragged a hundred pounds of ammo with you. 

Dean wrapped a bandanna around his cut hand as a sort of bandage, and then climbed out of the pool to go play wolf bait. “Don’t get eaten, dumbass,” Jody called after him. Dean felt that should be the official Winchester farewell. Not “Goodbye” but “Don’t get eaten, dumbass”. He should really just get that made as a t-shirt.

The idea was that Sam would text him when the sigil was drawn, so Dean could get ready, but truth be told, there was no getting ready. As soon as he saw werewolves flooding from the building, he had to run. That was it. He didn’t want to end up torn to pieces? Run faster. That was it.

It was kind of eerie walking back to the Sullivan building. The streets were empty like they never were, and he had a memory of Croatoan world that Zachariah sent him to, and shuddered a little. This was not the time to remember bad things. Or how it felt to get his flesh and muscles torn and shredded by hellhounds. Nope, this was a terrible time to think about things like that. 

He stood at the head of the street, which seemed like it was far enough away from the building, but also, seemed way too close. Werewolves were fast. Dean clenched his fists so hard blood leaked from the bandanna and hit the sidewalk, but that was probably for the best. Blood would draw the wolves for damn sure.

The Mark let out an odd pulse sensation that he could feel reverberate throughout his body, and then the phone in his pocket vibrated about thirty seconds later. Sam had drawn the sigil, and the Mark knew it before Sam could tell him. Interesting. Could they use the Mark as a way to find this guy? Again, monster calling to monster. It was a possibility. 

They had propped open the ground floor front and stairwell door of the Sullivan building, because they didn’t know if all the werewolves could get out and wanted to assure it. Dean had kind of been hoping that they’d come out in an easy line, and would take off running once they saw him. But that wasn’t the way it worked, of course. 

The wolves came pouring out of the building like someone had rung the dinner bell, and Dean had to take off running almost immediately, because goddamn, were they fast. He briefly glanced behind him to make sure they were following, and he saw a tide of maybe a dozen wolves, much closer to him than they should have been. The half wolves were bringing up the rear, because they still weren’t as fast as their four footed brethren. 

Next time, Sam was doing the scary ass shit. He’d done enough of this type of thing. Time to let Sam have it.

All he could hear was the slap of his boots and the sounds of claws scrabbling on pavement as they started making little yips and snarls as well, sure they just about had their prey down. The Mark burned, wanting to come out and slaughter every fucking one of them. He really didn’t need both animals clawing it out for room in his brain right now.

His lungs were burning by the time he plunged into the door of the open fitness center, and he would swear he could smell the terrible dog breath of the things, they were so close. But he didn’t look back to see, because honestly, he didn’t want to know how screwed he was.

 

What they’d worked out in advance was Sam and Jody would leave the second they heard Dean enter, and would go around, through the back fire exit, to the front, where they would lock the front door after the wolves. It would be up to Dean to reach that back fire exit and lock it, trapping the wolves inside completely, until they could figure out what to do with them, or the sigil’s power faded away, and they turned back into their human forms again. Whichever came first. Dean was willing to bet it was the turn human again part.

Dean didn’t stop running until he hit the pool, and he jumped in on the shallow end, which was fairly close, and yet, when he landed, he felt that sharp shock of impact up his legs. A couple more inches, and he would have broken an ankle or a knee. 

The bottom of the pool didn’t have great traction, but Dean took that as a good sign for the wolves being trapped in here. He had just hit the ladder on the deep end, right past the sigil drawn in his blood, when he heard wolves starting to jump in and join him. He climbed the ladder possibly faster than anyone ever had, and shoved it over once he was back on the solid ground. The four footed wolves could do nothing with it, and he wasn’t sure the half wolves were that smart or coordinated. 

It was only then, when he dumped the ladder in the pool, did he realize the flaw with the plan. Not all the wolves were in the pool yet. Some of them were still up here, and saw that he was up here with them now. 

Shit. 

Dean ran towards the back,hearing the scratch of claws on the floor, and as soon as he could, he slammed a door shut. The wolves hit it hard, making it jump in its frame, and he knew it maybe bought him, at most, five seconds before they broke it down. 

The Mark was continuing to burn, and in his head was keep up a constant stream of  _ killthemkillthemalltheresnoneedtorunkillthemall _ that was not only very distracting, but very disturbing, because it made perfect sense. He could kill them all, and it would be  _ fun. _ Tearing a werewolf apart with his bare hands, like he ripped off the head of that vampire last night? How fun would that be? Dean felt himself attracted and repelled by the same thought, and he hated it when that happened. He didn’t know what it said about him, but nothing good. 

He found another door he could shut, and was in the back of the center, running through locker rooms, having some unwelcome teenage flashbacks. Dean was pretty sure his legs were going to give out, or his lungs were going to explode, when he finally reached the back fire exit. Sam was holding the door open, and he pulled out his gun and aimed it behind him, confirming Dean’s worst fear: he had one glued to his ass. 

Sam fired his gun before he reached the door, and Dean would have sworn he felt the wind of the bullet as it rocketed by him and hit something that made a yelp noise. But he didn’t turn to look as he all but fell through the door, and Sam slammed it shut, Dean leaned against it and slid down to the ground, trying not to suck in air like a drowning man and failing miserably. 

He patted Sam’s leg and gave him a thumb’s up, because he couldn’t talk yet. “This was a stupid plan,” Sam snapped. “I can’t believe it worked.”

“You and me both,” Jody said, coming around the side. “Front’s locked. All we need to do is slap on a ‘Don’t open - wolves inside’ sign and call it a morning.” 

Dean was doing his best to not hyperventilate, and he think he succeeded, but oh boy, he felt lightheaded. That wasn’t a sprint, it was a marathon. “I think, while I was running for my life, I figured out a way we could find this son of a bitch.”

“Does it involve your blood?” Sam asked. 

Dean looked between him and Jody, and saw a brief glance between the two, that confirmed his worst fears. “What happened when you used by blood to make the sigil?”

Sam frowned, lips tightening to a thin line, but Jody didn’t give a fuck about his feeling right now, and told him. “It started sizzling, and then turned black. It smelled burnt. It was weird ass shit, and while I don’t do these kinds of things, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what was supposed to happen.”

No, Dean figured it wasn’t. No wondered the werewolves came pelting out the door. Using his cursed blood to make the sigil gave it an energy charge that the asshat and his sacrificed blood couldn’t match. As if simply thinking about it made it respond, Dean felt this wave of warmth go through him, and suddenly his calves weren’t burning, and he wasn’t gasping in breath anymore. The Mark was taking care of him, because he knew what he was about to say, and it was genuinely excited. God, this fucking thing. “We need to bring out the Mark,” Dean said. “It will find this bastard.”

Sam’s eyes widened in horror. “Dean, you’ve done enough dumb shit for the day.”

“Then give me another idea before he puts his big plan in motion,” he said, but knew as well as Sam did that that probably wasn’t going to happen.

Sometimes you needed a monster to fight a monster, and that’s all there was to it. 


	11. Never Ever

Sam knew nothing good was coming of it when Dean’s blood started to smoke for no goddamn reason. Even with a sigil like this, it shouldn’t have reacted like that. Sam went on with the plan, even though everything in him was screaming. 

So the Mark was poisoning his blood somehow? Changing it? In no way was that a good sign. Dean had probably drifted away more than he had realized. Dean was so good at concealing his own battles that he was farther gone than Sam had known. 

They had to finish this before he could consider its implications fully. But even while waiting for Dean to run in with werewolves on his ass, Sam was sure the Mark had come out and he was tearing into the wolves with his teeth when Dean finally came running in with a pack on his tail. So there was good news - his stupid plan had somehow worked, but why was he surprised? This was Dean’s specialty - the dumbass plan that shouldn’t have worked, and kind of didn’t, but still somehow did. It was really close, and Sam knew he didn’t get a heart shot on the werewolf coming after him, but at least it made him pause long enough that Dean got through the door without being bitten. So that was one win, although considering the reaction of the blood to the sigil, Dean probably couldn’t get turned into a werewolf. His blood would probably poison it. Still, he didn’t want to find out.

And Dean was continuing to hide things from him even though he asked that he didn’t, not while fighting the Mark. But was he really expecting Dean, who had spent his life hiding his misery from everyone and pretending he was bulletproof, to fucking stop now? In spite of everything, Dean was still a stubborn asshole who didn’t want to admit he needed help. Although, to be fair to him, who could help him? The answer seemed to be nobody, and Sam refused to accept that. There had to be something. He simply hadn’t looked hard enough. 

But they had to live through this to worry about that. And he really hated Dean’s stupid, stupid plan.

“What’s our guarantee you come back?” Sam demanded. “Tell me there isn’t a chance of the Mark taking you over.”

To his credit, Dean didn’t lie. “There isn’t any. But if it could take me over, it would have by now. I’m still fighting it. It hasn’t won yet.”

The  _ yet  _ part of that was bothering Sam immensely.

They had left while Jody was telling her people it was over. Sam had no idea what she was going to say about everything that happened, but she seemed to run a very tight ship. Whether they bought her explanation or not, they’d have to live with it. 

Sam sat in the passenger seat, as he almost always did, and tried to ride out the impulse to punch the dashboard. Dean would kill him if he hurt the car, and not in a hyperbolic sense. He might actually take out his gun and shoot him, and frankly, Sam might prefer that right now. “If we draw out the Mark, how do we know it’ll cooperate?”

“It gets to kill something? It’s on board,” Dean said, with no hesitation.

Yeah, that’s what he was afraid of. “And how do we draw it out?”

Dean shot him a quick glance. “Ever wanted to beat the shit out of me? This might be your lucky day.”

Sam scowled at him. “I’m not doing that.”

“C’mon, I won’t even fight back. Violence is the easiest way to get this thing out.”

“No.” It wasn’t that offer wasn’t tempting, because, come on - what younger brother hasn’t wanted to kick the shit out of his older brother? But he didn’t like so many things about this. And what if Dean never came back? His last memory of Sam would be him beating the shit out of him. No thanks. Been there, done that, got stuck in a cage in Hell for what seemed like an eternity.

Dean sighed dramatically, as if Sam was being the difficult one. “Fine. This thing really responds to dark magic. Throw a nasty spell. It’ll come out.”

Sam didn’t like that any better. Dark magic was costly, in every sense of the word. “You can’t just stop fighting it?”

He grimaced. “I don’t know if I can. I’m afraid if I stop ... I won’t be able to start again.”

Sam stared at him, alarmed, but Dean kept his eyes resolutely on the road, jaw so tense it looked like he was trying to crack his own molars. “What does that mean? Is it that much stronger than you?”

“No. I’m just ... I’m tired, Sam. I’m really tired.”

Okay, yeah, this was horrible. Dean was never too tired to fight. It made him wonder how difficult this had been for him. Sam had a feeling Dean had hid that part way too well. “What about hypnosis?”

“Isn’t that bullshit?”

“No, it’s basically putting a person in a trance. Some people are resistant to it, though.”

There was a long silence, which neither bothered to fill. When they were parked in the motel parking lot, Dean finally broke it. “What about, um, using drugs?”

“What about it?” Sam studied Dean as he looked out at the parking lot, as if something fascinating was out there. He suddenly understood. “Holy shit, you know of a drug that brings it out?”

“Um, yeah. I’ve been ... experimenting with trying to keep it down, and I found one that made it come out. I still have no idea why.”

Sam kind of knew this, but also, it was hard to separate it from Dean’s usual vice hunt. Making people think you were bulletproof and not at all miserable was a full time job, and you needed lots of reinforcements to keep it going. “What was it?”

Dean muttered something, but Sam couldn’t hear what he said. “What?”

He sighed, and seemed to brace himself, as if he knew what Sam was going to say. “Ketamine.”

Sam knew instantly why Dean was reluctant to tell him. “Ketamine?” Sam exclaimed, horrified. “The animal tranquilizer? The club drug? When did you ... why ... did you inject it?”

“Oh, fuck no, man. It was a pill. I took it with whiskey.”

This got better and better. “You took it with alcohol? How stupid are you? You could have stopped your own heart.”

“But I didn’t. I got a good night’s sleep for once, and woke up ...” Dean grimaced, as if tasting something sour. “I woke up in a ghoul’s lair, with a machete in my hand, ankle deep in blood. I don’t remember finding them, I don’t remember killing them. I just ... it just took over while I had a little vacation from reality.”

And Sam knew nothing about this. Son of a bitch. Dean fell into a K hole, and the Mark came out. Fantastic. “When the hell did this happen?”

Dean rubbed his eyes, as if he didn’t want to remember this at all., and certainly didn’t want to discuss it. “After we took care of the poltergeist in Ojai.”

Now Sam had the urge to punch him. Plant one right in his face. Feel his nose break under his knuckles. “Two fucking weeks ago? Were you ever going to tell me this?”

Dean scoffed. “Fuck no.”

“I can’t,” Sam said, getting out of the car. He slammed the door harder than necessary, but he couldn’t help it. He was fucking pissed.

Dean got out, more slowly. “Don’t be a drama queen.”

“Fuck you. You endangered yourself, you endangered me, you endangered countless people! You could have hurt someone else that night. You do realize that, yes?”

At least Dean had the decency to be ashamed, and looked down at the ground. “Yeah, I know. But the Mark filled in the memory gaps.”

“Oh, did it? And it wasn’t telling you what you wanted to hear?”

He threw his hands up, as if giving up. “Okay, fair, I don’t know. I can only hope it didn’t.”

Sam scoffed. “Hope. Yeah, that’s been working great for us.” He ran his hands through his hair, and tried to tamp his anger down. It wasn’t helping. And while Dean deserved to get the shit kicked out of him for this, could Sam do anything worse than what Dean had probably already done to himself? Part of him still wanted to try. “How much time did you lose?”

“About three hours.”

Sam cringed. The damage Dean could do in three hours. Although that was probably nothing next to the damage the Mark could do in three hours. “Do you have any idea of the dosage?”

He nodded. “I do. Why?”

Sam hated to say it. But he did. “Because if we halve it, we cut the time the Mark takes you over.”

“Oh, smart.”

He glared at him. As if any of this, in any fucking universe, could be considered smart! “That was the first time you did ketamine, wasn’t it?”

“Absolutely,” Dean lied. 

Sam turned his back on Dean, so he could silently curse him out without Dean reading his lips. If Dean were a normal person, he’d ask what possessed him to go out and do dangerous club drugs which were also date rape drugs, if he remembered correctly. But you know what? That might have been what Dean was after. Not date rape - forgetting. Falling into a K hole usually meant losing your memories while you were in there, and maybe forgetting a few other things too, at least for a little while. All Dean’s vices boiled down to basically a lot of the same thing. He was in pain, he was plagued by nightmares that would make most horror movies look like rom-coms, and there was no escape. Not for him, not for Sam. This was their life, and sometimes Dean needed to take these “little vacations” to deal with it. Unlike Sam, who buried himself in books, and was sometimes so depressed he never wanted to get out of bed. Who was to say who was dealing with it worse? They were both fucked, and honestly, not well. The fact that they could pass for sane much of the time was a miracle. 

As soon as Sam was sure he could look at Dean without needing desperately to punch him, he turned around. “Okay, so, our problem is now, where the hell do we find ketamine?”

Dean stared at him a moment, as if not believing him. “Dude, that isn’t a problem.” Deam walked to Ramon’s room door and knocked on it. 

After a few seconds, Ramon opened the door and peeked out cautiously. He still had a slice of pizza in his other hand. “Yeah?”

“Do you know where I can score some ketamine right away?”

Ramon thoughtfully chewed the pizza in his mouth before swallowing it, and saying, “How much and in what format? Smoke, drink, shoot, or sniff?”

Oh goddamn it. Having a normal brother was just too damn much to ask for, wasn’t it?

**

Dean knew that Sam basically knew, but he still hated to confirm it for him. He never wanted to rub his face in his ... what did he call it? Experiments? Chemical wanderings? Getting really fucked up. 

He wasn’t addicted to anything - well, booze; he had to admit he was probably a functional alcoholic at this point - and he never did anything while they were doing a job, unless he needed a major painkiller for an injury. The job was the job, and he couldn’t be compromised. Afterwards ..? Sometimes you needed a little something extra to sleep. Or live with yourself. Or both. 

He had pretty much made it his life’s work to never get Sam mixed up in this shit. It didn’t matter if Dean did, Dean knew his life had already crashed on the rocks and was never getting repaired, but he knew Sam had a chance, so he kept any extra-curricular drug stuff to himself. Especially since the one time Dad caught him with some spare Vicodin, and flipped his lid over it. Hiding it from Dad and Sam both while growing up was difficult, although Dad was away so much, it was only a hit or miss risk. Sam, in his snotty teen years, found some pot Dean had hidden and insisted on trying it, and Dean got him stoned, only to discover that Sam was unbearably paranoid and anxious on pot. Dean spent most of the night calming him through a series of panic attacks. In a way, it was oddly adorable, and made all sorts of sense that Sam couldn’t handle his weed, as he was an easy drunk too. But after that, Sam wanted nothing to do with drugs that weren’t alcohol, or prescribed to him, and Dean hid his drugs better, or did them completely outside the house/motel room/hunter’s shack. 

But the Mark ... made things difficult. Sometimes he could down bottle after bottle of whiskey, and he couldn’t feel it at all. Same with painkillers. If it didn’t want him to feel something, he didn’t. Other times, for whatever reason, it didn’t give a fuck. He couldn’t predict it, and had stopped trying. It found some of the harder and weirder drugs beyond its scope, so ketamine had a decent chance of working. Dean hadn’t expected the outcome he got, which was waking up covered in blood, holding a machete, and wondering how the fuck he got into an underground ghoul lair, and oh yeah, when had he killed all these ghouls? His last clear memory was washing down the ketamine with his mediocre whiskey, and flirting a bit with the bartender, who had purple hair and a septum ring. It was unsettling - what happened, not the bartender - and he didn’t like it at all. The Mark had memories of the time, and let him on them, but Sam was right - it was probably only showing him things it wanted to. Who knew what happened in between, in the gaps it didn’t show. Which is why he returned to the motel, had a long shower, and threw away the blood soaked pants and shirt he’d been wearing that night. He decided to pretend it never happened, and therefore Sammy was never going to know about it.

Except he did now. Dean had expected the horror on his face, but the disgust was a little hurtful. But he’d probably deserved worse. 

The Mark was eager. He could feel it in the back of his mind, like an excited little kid. Dean decided to go liquid, as it would absorb faster, and was less likely to be cut with something funky. Before Jason, the guy who was a friend of a friend of Ramon’s who was a dealer, dropped it off, Dean all but lectured himself in the bathroom mirror. “Yes, I am talking to myself like a crazy person, but this isn’t carte blanch. Do whatever you want to the motherfucker who’s trying to assemble a monster army, but that’s it. You get me? Don’t you fucking dare go off script. If you ever want to get out again, stick to the plan.”

But ultimately, he was just talking to himself. The Mark wouldn’t or couldn’t respond in any meaningful way, and they both knew it was only a matter of time before Dean surrender to it or it conquered him completely. The Mark only had to be patient, and it had existed since when? Since humans existed? Patience was its strong suit.

Dean pour the dose of liquid ketamine into his bottle of beer, because fuck it. Sam frowned, because he didn’t like him mixing it with alcohol, but he did the last time. Why break from tradition now?

Sam left briefly, and Dean was actually hoping he’d stay away, at least until he turned. It was bad enough he’d have to see the Mark unfettered by Dean, but it wouldn’t be the first time, would it? “Hurt him and I will find a way to kill us both,” Dean warned it. Although he hadn’t lied to Sam. He had felt more rested and calm after doing the ketamine, despite waking up to find he’d starred in a horror movie without realizing it. Dean was kind of looking forward to the feeling of being well rested that would come after.

But the stuff in between? That was going to be a bitch.

**

Sam made a phone call to the only person who might be able to help if the Mark spun out of control. He only got voice mail, though, so he didn’t know if it would mean anything. But at least he tried, right?

Sam found it kind of funny, but he didn’t want to go back to Dean’s room. He knew that soon, it would be the Mark wearing his brother, and Dean would be sleeping peacefully in his own mind, blissfully unaware of the things that monster was doing in his skin. His skin crawled with the knowledge of it. It was like Dean when he was a demon, although somehow worse. The Mark had even less of a conscience, if that was even possible. He figured demons were as conscienceless as you could get. But nope, the Mark had proved that wrong.

Sam stopped by his room to see if there was something he could use on the Mark if it went out of control. Holy water wouldn’t work, because the Mark was different from a demon. But Sam wondered what would happen if he combined a bunch of different purifying things together, in a kind of a slurry. Would it at least sting it, and not hurt Dean? A little research, and he filled a flask full of holy water, salt, and essence of peppermint and rosemary. It smelled pretty good. He just hoped it had some effect. He also packed more silver - knives and bullets. But he considered them last resorts. Dean was still in there.

Walking back to Dean’s room, he was surprised by Jody’s truck pulling into the lot. “I thought you might like to know, the werewolves seem to be back to human form again,” she said, getting out of the truck. “Jenkins called me confused, and wondered why he was half naked in an empty swimming pool with a bunch of strangers. I tried to convince him he’d gone on a bender, but he didn’t believe me.”

Sam imagined that must have been disorienting for all the werewolves. It wasn’t anywhere near a full moon. No one had been expecting to shift. “So they don’t know what happened?”

Jody shrugged. “So far, it seems that way. I don’t think Jenkins was lying. But now I don’t know what to do with him. I mean, he’s a werewolf. Is he a good guy or a bad guy?”

“That’s ... tricky. Not all werewolves are bad. Most are, but still, there are a few that have learned to channel their hunger. You’re going to have to talk with him and figure it out.”

Jody sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say something like that. So what do I do, bring a six pack by his house, and ask, “Hey - eaten any hearts lately?””

“I didn’t say it was going to be easy.”

“Yeah.” She glanced towards the highway, frowning. Sam couldn’t imagine what it was like to maybe have to kill one of your own officers. That had to be a nightmare.” Speaking of which, how goes our latest dumb ass plan?”

“It got way more dumb ass. But it’s under way.”

Jody raised an eyebrow. “How could it have possibly gotten more dumb ass?”

Sam knew ketamine - buying it without a license, taking it - was as illegal as fuck. Now, Jody was unlikely to arrest them, but he didn’t want to put her on the spot either. “Nobody seems more willing to hurt themselves more than my brother, that’s how.”

“I mean, not to cast aspersions or anything, but has he ever considered seeing someone for that? Or you for that matter?”

That briefly took Sam aback. “Uh, what?”

“I mean, I know, you can’t tell a therapist you hunt demons for a living or have been to literal Hell and back, but you can still talk to them about your feelings. It sounds dumb as shit, I know, but it actually helped me after ... well, you know. I mean, I had to tell the doctor my husband and son were murdered, I just left out the whole zombie part.”

Sam nodded. They’d all been through some shit, and he knew therapy probably would be an answer for all of them. But Sam couldn’t see himself doing that, and Dean certainly wouldn’t. “Yeah. It-“

Sam paused, as the door to Dean’s room opened, and Dean stepped out. Except, no, it wasn’t Dean.

The Mark had ramrod straight posture, and eyes so cold it felt like you could get frostbite if you looked at him too long. He also had this awful smirk, that reminded Sam a little too much of the demon. “Oh, lady cop, you’re back. Just in time to join the fun.”

Jody scowled at him. “Winchester, don’t ever fucking call me lady cop again, got me?” But after looking at him for several seconds, she took a step back. “Holy shit, who are you?”

“This is The Mark of Cain,” Sam said, putting his hand on the flask in his pocket. Didn’t know if it would work, and he desperately hoped they didn’t have to find out. 

“Oh, come on, Sammy, why be so formal? Just call me Dean.”

“You’re not him.”

“Now, we both know I’m more him than either of you would like to admit.”

Sam hated this fucking thing. If it wasn’t wearing Dean, he would have loved to find out if he could punch it to death. And it probably knew that, which is why it was leering at him right now. “Can you find our sigil maker, or was this all a waste of time?” Sam asked, deciding to jump straight to the point. 

The Mark rolled his eyes. “No fun Sammy, so goddamn predictable. Yes, I can find him. And if you humans weren’t so fucking crippled, you could find him too. He’s a vortex of bad energy, driving towards the center of town.”  The Mark pointed down the freeway, and then ended by giving Jody a finger gun, which was oddly creepy. 

“Okay, I take it back,” Jody said. “Your brother isn’t the cockiest son of a bitch I’ve ever met. This one wins.”

“Oh honey, I always win.”

“Call me honey again and I break your nose,” she snapped.

The Mark chuckled. “Be warned, I consider that foreplay.”

She was reaching for her cuffs when Sam pushed in front of the Mark, and said, “You talk a big game, but we have no proof you can find this guy. Do it, or we find out how much ketamine you can take before you can’t function anymore.”

“Ketamine?” Jody exclaimed. 

The Mark continued smirking at him, his eyes glittering like glass. “Fine. It ain’t like I’m not gonna completely own your brother’s ass in a month anyways. But you knew that, right?” The Mark went to the Impala, and leaned against the hood, like Dean never would. “Let’s go kill us an asshole.”

Sam was just sorry he didn’t mean himself. 


	12. Mr. Plague

In a way, it was a good the Mark had come out, just so Sam knew honestly, from the bottom of his heart, that he hated this fucking thing and wanted it to die. And he wanted it out of Dean as soon as possible. Honestly, Dean must have had the patience of a saint to put up with this goddamn thing for so long.

Sam drove, while the Mark sat in the passenger seat, guiding him. He was also talking nonstop about how pointless all of this was. That the world was going to burn, and they weren’t even doing the slightest bit of damage to evil, blah blah blah, evil supervillain speech number thirty seven. 

Sam tuned back in for taunting. “You know he’s unraveling fast, don’t you?” The Mark said, with unabashed glee. “He’s one disaster away from giving in, and let’s face it, you guys’ specialty is disasters. I mean, god - or whatever - forbid something happens to lady cop-“

Sam pulled out his gun and cocked it, aiming it at his head. “Finish that sentence.”

The Mark laughed. “Ooh, putting on the big boy pants, Sammy? Come on - we both know you’re not shooting your brother.”

“No, I’d be shooting you. There’s a difference.”

“Not really. I’d just withdraw, let him die choking on his own blood, and then have his body all to myself. So go ahead and pull that trigger, Sammy. You’d be doing both of us a favor.”

Sam put the safety back on and returned the gun to his pocket. “I will live to see you killed.”

“Sorry, Sammy, but you won’t.”

“Stop calling me Sammy.”

“Okay, Samuel.” He grinned, utterly pleased with himself. 

Sam decided he wasn’t going to engage with this fuckhead any more. Just let him ramble, and pay no attention to him. But god, that was always easier to say than do. Especially when the little bastard was trying to piss him off on purpose. And the motherfucking bastard was enjoying every moment of it. 

The Mark led them to a sort of fancy farmhouse gone to seed, down a long, private dirt road. It looked like no one was here, and no one had been here for years. “Is this a fucking joke?” Sam asked, getting out of the car. 

The Mark got out, and sighed, although he was still grinning smugly. “Sorry Samuel, but your trail ends here.”

Jody got out of her truck, since she’d been following them, and kept looking at the house as if it was familiar to her. “Know this place?” Sam asked.

Jody nodded while staring at it. “I think this is Sheriff Grady’s old place.”

Sam had no idea who that was, but he guessed. “Your predecessor?”

“Yeah. He’s wasn’t exactly run out of town on a rail, but it was close.”

“Catch me up. What did he do?”

Jody made a sour face, as if the memory itself tasted bad. “He was one of those good old boys, you know.”

“Racist as fuck?” The Mark asked, with an inordinate amount of cheer.

“Yeah. And sexist as fuck, and homophobic as fuck, and corrupt as the day is long. He was caught on tape taking a twenty thousand dollar bribe from the CEO of one of the biggest fracking companies around to make looming rape charges against their vice president go away. And this was right before the reports came out about the contaminated groundwater, so Grady put himself smack in the middle of a shit hurricane with his odious fuckery. “

The Mark snickered. “I may have been wrong about you. You’re-“

Jody pointed at him with her baton. “Shut the fuck up.”

Sam would have been amused, except what she just said was no laughing matter. “So Grady was kicked out of office?”

Jody nodded. “And prosecuted, but he cut a deal and got time served, which infuriated everyone, and seemed to be a confirmation that the good old boys network still protected its own. And the rape charges were never brought against the VP, and the fracking company fled before they could be made to pay for cleaning up the water. It was bad feelings all the way around. I’ve spent a better part of my time as Sheriff trying to clean up the mess he left in the department.”

Sam considered that. It was a lot. And absolutely all of it was motive for a rampage. “Does he still live here?”

“Grady? Oh fuck no. He left town in the dead of night, and hasn’t been seen since. It was probably the smart thing, because a lot of people wanted a piece of his hide.”

Sam wondered if he had indeed left, or if he was the first sacrifice, to kick things off. Yeah, it was a while ago, but sometimes intent was more important than time for some spells. “Think someone’s still angry enough to want to revenge?”

Jody thought about a moment. “I bet. But he’s not here anymore.”

“But the corrupt system that allowed him to flourish is,” the Mark said. For no obvious reason, he was tearing a long, golden weed into tiny pieces. Maybe he needed to destroy something, even if it didn't matter. “And while you can slap on as much paint as you want, a turd is still a turd.”

Jody gave him such a flinty glare, Sam was kind of surprised the Mark’s head didn’t pop like an overfilled balloon. “I hope you’re not calling me a turd.”

“Well-“

Sam held up his hand to the Mark, shutting it up. “Ignore him. He’s the biggest turd here. But - and it kills me to say this - he has a point. Someone who’s angry enough to look into black magic might not make a distinction between good cops and bad ones.”

The Mark walked to the locked gate that kept the abandoned property theoretically safe, and kicked it. It was a nothing kick, he barely put any effort in it, and the gate was blasted clear off its hinges, landing in two separate pieces just short of the front porch of the house. “Looks like he left the door unlocked,” the Mark said, walking towards the house. 

“You don’t have permission to vandalize,” Jody snapped. Her hand went unconsciously to her gun, but she didn’t take it out. Sam shrugged and held out his arms in a kind of apology. She had to know Dean was in there, as much as he did. It was simply difficult to not want to pistol whip him within an inch of his life. 

“Tell Rapey old Grady he can sue my ass for damages,” the Mark replied flippantly. As soon as it hit the porch, it didn’t even try the doorknob, simply planted another kick that sent the door flying inward, as if hit with a repulsor cannon. “Trick or treat,” the Mark shouted, walking in. 

“Holy shit, that thing is the worst,” Jody said. 

Sam nodded. It was. Demon Dean had been bad enough, but this was like his even more annoying, even more homicidal brother.

“Any idea how you’re gonna get rid of it?”

“Not at the moment.”

“If you need help, or someone to shoot it, you know where to find me.”

That made Sam smile, but only briefly. It would be great if shooting was the answer. But it wasn’t.

Stepping into the house, Sam instantly saw that the Mark hadn’t been lying to them. There were burned Latin words and symbols drawn in blood on the walls, clumps of charred wormwood and other greenery he couldn’t identify littering the foyer. There were also charred and broken bones within a poorly drawn containment circle in what probably used to be the living room. Sam felt something gritty under his feet, and a glance down confirmed it was salt. Jody must have noticed it too. “Somebody was experimenting with magic, weren’t they? How much of it do you think they got right?”

“Enough to draw monsters in. But I’m kind of surprised they’re still alive. There’s a very steep learning curve, especially with this darker stuff.”  The room smelled like slagged iron, which usually meant something bloody had burned here. Not recently, but not far enough away that the scent didn't linger.

Sam looked around, trying to build a narrative out of the clues, but it was difficult. The furniture was all gone, but a rug had been rolled up and set aside. Jody walked over to the tiny pile of charred bones, and nudged it with the toe of her boot while looking at them. “These aren’t animal bones, are they?”

“I don’t know. I’m hoping they are, but hope’s been a little thin on the ground lately.”

There was the booming sound of a gunshot, which made them both jump, and run towards the back of the house, drawing their own weapons.

The Mark had clearly been through here, as the back door in the kitchen was missing, and splayed out over the back lawn like the debris from an explosion. Although lawn wasn’t the word for it - it had been a field at one time, and maybe crops were grown there in the long ago gone, but now it was weeds, many of which had died down in the summer heat to a brown crew cut. There was a saggy tool shed that no longer had a roof, and farther beyond that, a barn that was involved in a slow motion collapse. It had probably once been brick red, but weather had eroded it to a disturbingly fleshy pink, which made the symbols drawn on it stand out all the more. Sam recognized some as being popular Satanic symbols, and others seemed to be more sigils straight out of the Bloody Bible. It was like mixing up Goodnight Moon with Naked Lunch. One was kid stuff, and the other far too advanced and dangerous in the hands of a novice. 

And standing in the middle of a burned summoning symbol half way between the back porch and the tool shed, was a portly middle aged man with thinning silver hair, an a .357 Magnum, which seemed like much more gun than he needed. He was also standing over the Mark’s - Dean’s - body, which was laying face down inside the circle, and actively bleeding. The thirsty soil was rapidly absorbing it all. 

Sam and Jody instantly drew down on him, but he held up a hand, and said, “Drop your guns or I drop this.” In his non-gun hand, he was holding what looked like a hex bag, but it was dripping blood. 

“How is that a threat?” Jody asked. It was completely fair. It didn't look like anything important or dangerous.

But the circle he was standing on, Sam could see it a little better now. It was the mother of all summoning sigils. It probably needed fresh blood, and perhaps an organ or two, to make it work.  And if he got wise, and used Dean’s blood? It would be the summoning equivalent of a nuclear bomb. “It’s another sigil,” Sam said, holding his hands up and dropping his gun. “The biggest yet.”

Jody seemed dubious, but she followed Sam’s lead, and dropped her gun. “In that case, I have to know when the hell you got into black magic, Grady.”

“That’s Sheriff Grady to you, bitch,” the man who was apparently Grady snapped. 

Sam’s mind reeled. It wasn’t someone getting revenge on the cops because of Grady. It was Grady getting revenge on the cops - and town - that threw him out. What the hell? He torpedoed himself! If he wasn't such a shitbag, none of this would have happened. He had no one to blame but himself. But of course, like most egomaniacs, he didn't see it that way. “This stuff is dangerous,” Sam said, trying to draw Grady’s focus back to him. “Where did you find it?”

“The dark web. You can even buy kidneys there. Infants. It’s amazing.”

“What’s the plan here, Joe?” Jody asked. “Destroy the whole town because you got rumbled?”

“This was my fucking town,” he spat. “The Gradys have been here since before this hunk of godforsaken shit was a state. This is all that’s left of my glorious birthright.” He gestured with the hand holding the dripping bag of whatever the hell. Sam thought he spied movement inside it, like the bleeding object was still partially alive. “ This whole fucking place deserves to burn.”

“And that’s your grand plan?” Jody said. “Getting monsters to what, eat everyone? Strip the town bare? Then what?”

“My wife left me!” he snapped, spittle flying from his lips. “My daughter won’t speak to me anymore! I have nothing! You don’t deserve to have anything if I can’t!”

And that’s when the Mark pulled out one of Dean’s knives, and stabbed him in the foot.

He sunk that knife in all the way to the hilt, and while Grady screamed, the Mark stood and did two things simultaneously. He ripped the dripping bag out of his hand, and ripped the Magnum away. He didn’t keep it; he threw it away. What use did the Mark have for a gun? “Hey, dickhead? While I appreciate burning this shit town down, doing it for such whiny reasons is really fucking embarrassing. You’re dragging down the whole side.”

Grady had tears of pain streaming from his eyes, but he still seemed incredulous. “I shot you.”

“Sure did. Too bad I’m bulletproof, huh?” The Mark then headbutt him, and Grady collapsed to the ground, screaming as the knife continued to hold his foot down, and gravity made the wound that much wider. 

“I was wondering why you were playing dead,” Sam admitted, retrieving his gun.

“I wanted to hear this pissweasel’s villain monologue. Christ, now I just wish I tore his throat out with my teeth. It was the most lame ass thing I’ve ever heard. And I’ve heard Dean’s internal monologue.” The Mark peeked inside the bleeding bag, had no reaction to what he found, and threw it far away. 

“What the fuck are you?” Grady snapped. He sat up, and grabbed the knife, and the moment he did, he screamed and let it go. Yeah, action movies made it look so easy, didn’t it? But when you got stabbed hard enough that you got pinned to something, it was actually reasonably difficult to pull the weapon out again. Lots of pain, and further damage to muscle and tissues. Not to mention that sometimes the blade that stabbed you was the only thing keeping you from bleeding out. You never pulled out a knife unless you had a plan for dealing with the aftermath. And Sam was really fucking sorry he knew this all by heart. 

Jody approached, and the Mark turned to look at her, making her stop. Sam could see the hole in Dean’s shirt where he was presumably shot, and while there was still residual blood there, there was no wound. So the Mark could heal him when it wanted to? That didn’t seem like a positive development. How much of his own body did Dean have left? It was mutating around him, from blood to tissue. Sam tried to imagine how terrifying that was, and remembered how difficult it was for him to live with the Lucifer hallucinations after Cas broke those memories wide open. Did Dean feel as hopeless as Sam had? Christ, he probably did. But being Dean, he was trying to ride it out and pretend everything was fine, while he died one piece at a time. “And what are you doing?” the Mark asked.

Jody fixed him with a gimlet eyed stare. “I’m arresting him for ... well, fuck, every goddamn thing I can throw at the wall and make stick. Can’t get him for witchcraft, but he did pull a gun on an officer and a civilian. And I’m wondering about those bones inside the house.”

“And I don’t count for anything?”

“Show me your wound.”

The Mark smirked. “Ah. I see. Assault against an ageless curse that can’t actually be hurt doesn’t count, does it?”

“You’re not arresting me,” Grady spat. He drew something out of his coat, and held it to his neck. Sam couldn’t see what it was, but there was no way it was any good. “Burn with the rest of this town, you motherfucking bastards.” He was holding a blade, which was revealed when Grady slit his own throat open.

Jody and Sam both gasped as blood fountained from his cut neck, but the Mark had no reaction, save for laughing uproariously, like this was some grand joke. 

But Sam understood why the Mark laughed a millisecond later. Gray’s blood washed over the sigil, and seemed to channel into it, filling out the char marks in the dirt, making them briefly glow with the infusion of fresh blood. Sacrificed blood. 

Holy shit. Grady was his own final sacrifice. 

Jody saw it too. “Oh, tell me this doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

“Do you think it means you’re fucked?” the Mark asked, wiping a tear of amusement from his eye. “’Cause it totally does.”

Jody looked to Sam expectantly. “How do we stop this? There’s gotta be a way to do that, right?”

The Mark walked out of the sigil and tilted his head, as if looking at it from another angle. “Nope, sweetheart. Once these things are cast, they’re cast. It’s gonna be fascinating. I’ve never seen a monstergeddon before. Think we have enough time to make some popcorn?”

Sam glared at the Mark, who shrugged. “Just me? Fine.” He started walking back towards the house. “I’m the only one who’s going to live through it anyways. Might as well make myself a snack.”

Oh shit. What did they do now? 

 


	13. Die Into Us

Sam recalled Dean’s question of things being on a scale from fucked to smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, and realized it applied here. How many monsters were hitting the city? From what direction? Was it only awakening the monsters already here, or was it calling them in, like the akephaloi? Shit, this was a disaster. And he and Jody were two people. There was no fucking way they could handle it all.

Sam wanted to give into despair here, but didn’t. There had to be a way to fight this ...

Wait. Fire with fire worked on the office building, right? Fight a sigil with a sigil.

He went to Grady’s dead body, and started searching his pockets. “What are you doing?” Jody asked.

“Searching for his phone. Got it.” He was hoping he hadn’t bled on it enough to damage it, which was a gruesome thought, but he hadn’t. Still, as soon as he powered it up, he saw he had a new problem. “Shit.”

“What is it?”

“It’s password protected.”

“Try Juliet.”

Sam gave her a quizzical look before trying it, but he did it, and as soon as he hit enter, the phone unlocked. “Wife’s name?”

Jody shook her head. “Daughter. So why are we raiding his phone?”

“I’m hoping he has a copy of the Bloody Bible - or as much of it as he could buy - on here, and that maybe there’s a sigil we can use to repel the monsters, canceling out the first one.”

Jody’s eyes lit up. It was the closest thing they had to hope. “Is that even possible?”

“Honestly? Don’t know. But we better hope so, because otherwise I’m out of ideas.” 

Sam found the files quickly, as Grady hadn’t really bothered to hide them. They were in no order, and Sam found some files he knew to be scams, or lesser spells from other works. Finally, he found one that could work, a purification sigil of sorts, but it needed a lot of blood. Sam thought he might have something better. “Dean!” Only after he yelled it did it occur to him the Mark might not answer by his name. What did he call it, then? Honestly, he didn’t want to know. He wanted to call it dead and be done with it.

The Mark finally looked out from where the kitchen door used to be, a sandwich in his hand. “Did you bellow like a great moose?”

Oh god, Sam so wanted to beat his face into pulp. “Come here, we need you.”

The Mark sighed and rolled his eyes, but did saunter casually towards them, still eating his sandwich. The Mark didn’t need to eat, did it? Maybe this was a sign Dean was starting to wake up. “Well, of course you do. You’re only mere humans, and I’m so much more.”

Sam swallowed back the urge to punch him, grabbed him by the arm, and led him to a clean wall spot on the outside of the house. He pulled out a knife, and the Mark gave him a withering stare. And still hadn’t abandoned his sandwich. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I need your blood to draw a sigil.”

He rolled his eyes again, and finally tossed away the rest of his sandwich. “Fine. But I’ll do it. You probably want to stab me until I look like Swiss cheese. And the irony is, you’d only be hurting your brother.”

“Which is why I haven’t stabbed you.” Sam reluctantly gave it the knife, and it sliced the palm of Dean’s hand like it was no big deal. 

Sam looked between the phone and the wall as he used Dean’s cursed blood to draw the sigil, and eventually he handed off the phone to the Mark to hold. It was a complicated sigil, because of course it would be. When he finally finished off the last rune, Dean’s blood did that thing again, where it spontaneously bubbled and smoked, finally charring black. “Cool,” the Mark said. 

Then it grimaced and bent at the waist, so swiftly the phone dropped from his hand and bounced on the ground, stopping by Sam’s foot. He picked it up, as the Mark gasped, “What the fuck was that?”

Sam took it as a good sign that the sigil affected the Mark. If it had reacted stronger, than he would have considered using it against him. But sadly, he recovered. “Did you know that would happen?”

“Nope.” 

The Mark glared at him, but Sam was genuinely telling the truth. He didn’t know. He didn’t know if any of it would work. This was a last minute hail mary.

Jody came up and said, “Is it over?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t think so. I mean, it wasn’t a perfect match. I think it should fend off the worst of it.”

“But we’re still gonna have monsters attacking the town?”

“Probably.”

Jody sighed. “Goddamn it.” She looked around at all the sigils and the dead body of Grady, and threw her hands in the air. “Fuck it. I’ll call this in once the monster fighting’s over.”

“Probably wise,” Sam admitted. All he knew about real police works was there was a shit ton of rules to follow and paperwork to file. His hat was off to Jody, because while he could play Fed, no way did he want to do that in real life. The worst part about training to be a lawyer had been all the paperwork, and while surely it subsided once you were an actual lawyer, Sam had a feeling he still would have hated it. And he couldn’t imagine how many days of paperwork finding the dead body of disgraced former Sheriff at what seemed an awful lot like a quasi-satanic crime scene would entail. 

  
“He’s not going anywhere,” the Mark said, nodding at Grady’s corpse. He walked over and pulled the knife out of his foot, wiping it off on Grady’s pant leg before sticking it back in Dean’s pocket. “You know, I could kick around here, burn some evidence.”

“We need you,” Sam said. He hated to say it, but it was true.

The Mark gave him that smarmy grin again. “Of course you do, Samuel. But I fail to see what’s in it for me.”

“Killing to your heart’s content.”

The Mark sarcastically winced, which was the first time Sam had honestly seen that. “You do know my weak spot.”

So they left the Grady homestead intact - such as it was - and not on fire. Sam knew, if Jody didn’t keep a lid on this, there might be some “Satan worshiper panic”, which certainly had a heyday in the ’80’s. It was bullshit, and honestly, hurt the hunting of actual supernatural threats. People who were in the Satanic church, as it existed, were simply contrarian hedonists who didn’t actually believe that Satan was real, and would be horrified if Crowley randomly turned up at one of their meetings. True Satan worshipers were usually demons, and slightly more dangerous than your average demon, but only just. While there were cults, their danger varied, from  _ harmless idiots  _ to  _ oh god why would you ever do that _ . Sam could start listing them, if anyone ever wanted a list. No one did.

On the drive back to town, the Mark was less interested in taunting him and more interested in the Bloody Bible. Sam didn’t like that, and kept answers either vague, wrong, or both. He didn’t want him knowing about it at all, and was sorry he had to hold the phone for any length of time while Sam copied the sigil. He kept looking for hints Dean was coming back, but the eating back at the house had been it. So far. If they were correct on dosage of the ketamine, it shouldn’t last for more than another thirty minutes or so. Or so he hoped. 

At first, everything seemed okay. Sam followed Jody to the police station, where she had already radioed ahead and advised everyone to be on high alert. But things seemed quiet. Sam wondered if he had managed to accomplish a miracle, and rested his head on the steering wheel a moment, enjoying the quiet. Was the bloodshed finally over for the day? He needed either a very large coffee, a very large beer, a shower, or a nap. Probably all at once, but magic could only be pushed so far. 

The passenger door was open, because the Mark got bored and got out of the Impala, and because of that, Sam heard one of Jody’s officers come up to her. “Uh, boss? We’re getting an influx of calls from downtown.”

Sam lifted his head, suppressing a groan, as Jody asked, “What’s going on, Erica?”

“Uh, there’s some people reporting some very fast people who seem to be trying to bite other people? And then others are saying there are zombies trying to eat people. Was this the thing you were worried about?”

The word zombies made Sam sit up, and he wasn’t surprised to see that Jody looked as tense as he felt. If there was a worst case scenario, that was it. “Yeah. Tell everyone who’s calling in, and the guys out there already, to lock themselves down, and shelter in place. We’ll give them the all clear when it’s safe to come out.”

“Chief, what’s going on?” Erica asked. She tried to sound professional, but weariness had crept into her tone, and Sam sympathized. “Today’s been completely mental.”

“It’s the tainted groundwater,” the Mark said, in the smooth, matter of fact tone Dean used for his more casual lies. “In higher concentrations, it can cause near psychotic reactions. The CDC is working on it, but some people are pretty far gone.”

“Really?” Erica asked. She was a young police officer, so new to the job she practically squeaked. But she seemed to believe him. “Are they going to be okay?”

“Eventually. Right now, all we can do is sedate them. Don’t worry, our mandate is to bring them in unharmed.”

That seemed to assure her, and Erica returned to the station. As soon as she was gone, Jody turned to the Mark, looking surprised, and asked, “Dean?”

All of that had sounded like Dean and not the Mark. Even Sam looked, to see if Dean had rejoined them. But if he had been there - and Sam thought maybe he was - an iciness seemed to slam down in his eyes, as if the Mark had reasserted itself. “Don’t insult me,” the Mark spat. 

But even his voice sounded different than it had a few seconds ago. Dean was starting to come back. The Mark was fighting him, or he was fighting it, but time was running out. In a way, Sam was grateful, but on the other hand ... who was winning the fight? The Mark seemed to be, at least for now. 

Jody came over to the Impala and ducked her head inside. “Can we do what we did before?” Sam wasn’t sure what she was talking about, and she must have seen that on his face, because she clarified, “Bring the monsters to us.”

“Oh, yeah. Are you thinking about the empty lot? We could probably move it to the abandoned factory where the vampire’s set up their nest. Less chance of witnesses, and they’ll have to funnel inside, so we can guarantee they won’t swarm us.”

“Sounds good to me.” She patted the roof of the car before turning back to her truck, and the Mark slid into the passenger seat, as if he hadn’t lost control of his body for a moment. “Do I finally get to kill something? I’m bored.”

“I’ll be so glad when you’re gone,” Sam sighed, starting the car.

“Oh, I’m never going anywhere, Samuel.” 

Sam really wanted to tell him to stop calling him that, but he’d probably go back to Sammy, and oh god, how he wished he could kill this fucker. Mentally, he urged Dean on. The Mark was a more sadistic fighter, sure, but Dean was still very good at what he did, and would never be unwelcome to a brawl.

They returned to the lot where Sam first saw the Mark in all its bloody glory, and they went to the factory, which hadn’t been cleaned up at all, but was definitely empty. Sam had figured, after seeing the Mark in action and living through it, Bellatrix would get the hell out of Dodge at the first opportunity, dragging Draco with her. Her word meant nothing. She was a vampire, after all, and why would she give a shit? 

But all that did was buy her a little time. He and Dean would hunt them down, if only for their dumb ass names. 

The Mark spent some time going through the weapons cache, and finally came out with a machete and a hammer, the latter of which gave Sam unwelcome demon Dean flashbacks, and was probably the whole reason for the choice. Sam, for his part, grabbed one of the empty packs they had in the back, and filled it full of ammo. He had no idea how many ghouls and zombies they’d be facing, but he wanted to be ready. He also took a couple of machetes, because they never needed reloading.

The Mark’s hand had healed completely, because of course it had, and he had to cut it again so Sam could draw the summoning sigil in his blood on the wall. “So ghouls are basically fast zombies?” Jody asked. She had her own shotgun, but she picked up one the machetes, and used a strap to hang it over her back, so she instantly pull it around if she needed to. 

“Yeah, without the rotting. And they are unbelievably fast. Talking superhuman here. So be careful.”

“But the death’s the same. Destroy the brain?”

Sam nodded. “Or take off the head, just to be sure.”

“Or smash it into pulp,” the Mark said, with an unsavory sort of joy.

“Are you ever going to piss off out of here?” Jody asked. 

The Mark leered at her. “You should enjoy me while you can. You won’t have the chance when I burn the world down.”

“Are you kidding? You’re gonna bore it to death first. Get a new threat, Magneto.”

Sam concentrated on the sigil so he didn’t laugh, and he kept the corner of his eye on the sour faced Mark, in case it tried anything. But by then the sigil was done, and the blood smoked and charred as it supercharged the spell. 

Sam and Jody stood back to back, shotguns ready, bag of ammo at their feet, while the Mark walked to the very front of the factory, machete at his side, only currently holding the hammer. There was a tense minute of waiting and silence, which reminded Sam that this was the part he hated the most - when you knew an attack was coming, but you had to wait for it. A lovely moment of calm before the shit tornado landed right on your head. Dean seemed to like that, as he once said, “Well, at least we know it’s coming this time.” Which was fair, but didn’t make the waiting any less torturous. 

The Mark held open his arms, and said, “Time to die for good, you motherfucking parasites.”

The ghouls, so much faster than your average anything, swarmed in first, and the Mark was almost instantly buried in the tide of them, although blood and bone was already flying, and you could hear the Mark laughing somewhere within the crush of bodies. 

Sam shot the first couple of ghouls he saw, reducing their heads to fine red fragments, but as soon as he was out of shots, they were too close to reload, so he picked up his machete and started hacking. He had never been overly concerned about the zombies. The ghouls would always be the worst, simply because of their power set. 

The Mark had come out of the crush of ghoul bodies covered in blood, but none of it was his. He was grinning as he drove the hammer all the way into a ghoul’s skull. That was literal - he hit it so hard the hammer went into the ghoul’s skull like it was a Halloween pumpkin. As the Mark pulled it out of the ghoul’s head, he swung the hammer back, and buried it claws first in the face of another ghoul, ripping down as it screamed, and much of its face was torn away. The Mark laughed and kicked it into an oncoming ghoul. The Mark hadn’t even used his machete yet, because he was having too much fun with the hammer. It was one of the most disgusting things he’d ever seen, and coming from him, that was saying something. Sam had seen and done more than a few disgusting things in his life. 

The problem was, he let it distract him, and one of the ghouls grabbed him by his machete hand and attempted to pull him into the throng, while another chomped down on his shoulder. Suddenly there was a blast that made his ears ring, and the ghoul that had been biting into his shoulder lost the top of his head and hit the ground. “Thanks, Jody,” he said, yanking the machete back from the ghoul and bisecting its skull with the blade. Why did they always go for his shoulder?

Soon they were out of ghouls, and the zombies arrived. The Marked welcomed them by grabbing the first zombie he saw, pulling on its hair, and pushing its body away at the same time. Because it was rotted and not mostly intact, he was able to manually rip the head off without having to use a knife this time. He tied it by its hair to his belt, so the Mark wore the severed head like a trophy. Why Sam had no idea, except it apparently loved being disgusting. 

Sam hung back a bit on the zombies, and let Jody go to town on them, because she had a personal and very specific reason for hating zombies, and she deserved the chance to vent a little. She was so into killing them she didn’t seem to notice.

Finally, they were done. The attack had lasted what, two minutes maybe, three? It seemed to take both forever and no time at all, and they were ankle deep in headless corpses. His arms burned, from exertion and the ghoul bite. The Mark had never used the machete, and he was standing there, covered in gore, his shirt torn in half, a decapitated zombie head hanging down from his hip. His right hand held the bloody hammer, and blood and other bodily fluids coated that arm from fingertips to elbow. Sam was willing to bet it had punched through a couple ghouls or zombies, possibly reached down throats as well. If it had key words, they were hurt, humiliate, and destroy. 

Sam glanced back at Jody, to find she was glancing back at him. They both nodded they were okay, and that seemed to be enough. 

“Well, this was fun and all, but I gotta get moving,” the Mark said, walking towards the door. He stomped on one loose zombie skull and squashed it flat.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Sam demanded.

The Mark turned back to look at him in the doorway, and gave him that sadistic grin again. “Well, I think I found a way to stay here full time, so thanks for that.” The Mark dropped the hammer, and held up a phone.

Grady’s phone, with the Bloody Bible on it. 

Sam checked his pocket, but that was stupid, because of course the Mark at taken it from him, maybe when they were getting weapons from the trunk. “It won’t help you,” he said. He was probably lying, although he didn’t know for sure. There were a lot of sigils. 

Jody drew her pistol. “Want to find out how good a shot I am? Put it down or I shoot it out of your hand.”

The Mark drew Dean’s pistol in return. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m the best shot there is. And I bet you I could paint the walls with Sam’s brains before your bullet could cross the room. Want to try it and see?”

She let out a sigh of disgust, and holstered her gun. The Mark didn’t holster his. He still held it, and now he was grinning. “Whatever shall I do with you two? Decisions, decisions.”

“Dean won’t let you hurt us,” Sam said. He hoped that was true.

The Mark chuckled. “He’s asleep, Samuel. Big brother can’t save you now.”

“Dean, wake up and kick his ass,” he shouted. 

Would it work? Probably not. But right now, Sam didn’t have any other ideas. 


	14. Wayside

Dean wasn’t sure what it was like to be on ketamine if you were a normal person. But he could say that about pretty much everything.

After all, he’d probably seen more veterinarians to treat his injuries than a genuine doctor, and he’d been in the hospital a ton. But growing up, Dad knew a couple of vets, and they were pretty much the go to doctors for hunters who couldn’t or shouldn’t visit a hospital. He remembered, vaguely, after helping his Dad in one of his earliest hunts, with a ghost who turned out to be two ghosts, and really violent, he got his first broken arm set by a vet. What the hell was his name? Anyway, he knew Dad somehow, and oh yeah, for some reason Dad was kind of wanted in the state at the time, which is why he couldn’t take Dean to a proper hospital. He was wanted for grave desecration, right? Hazard of the job. Not that the vet had done a bad job, he’d set the arm just fine, but it was Dean’s first taste of animal tranquilizers as painkillers, and holy hell, they seemed to be so much better than human ones. Of course, they were dangerous, and not meant for human consumption, but hey, he was a hunter - he was supposed to be dead by thirty. So who the fuck cared?

Of course, the joke was on him. Despite dying a few times, he was still alive, and past thirty. So he probably should have taken better care of himself. But why start now? If he hadn’t done it at ten, he saw no point in starting at thirty. Besides, now he had an immortal curse riding his bones. He was as doomed as you could get. 

On the Mark, these drugs were like slipping into a warm jacuzzi, only he couldn’t see anything, and he couldn’t feel water, just warmth. Still it was nice. It was the first genuine peace he’d had in quite a while. 

And then he started hearing voices. 

It was like eavesdropping on people in another room. He caught snippets, words here and there, and he recognized the voices: Sam’s, Jody’s. His own? Shit, it sounded like it. It also sounded like he - no, the Mark - was a complete dick, which was no surprise. He shared a brain with it; he knew what a motherfucking bastard it was. 

He was completely disconnected from himself, though. He couldn’t feel the confines of his own body, which was as liberating as it was frightening. He had no idea how long he’d been out, but it must have been some time. Jody was talking about another Sheriff, he guessed, and something about contaminated water, but he couldn’t completely focus. He could hear Sam saying something, but not the words, just his tone. It was his _ “I have no idea what’s going on, but I’m going to roll with it and see what happens” _ tone of voice, which was basically his default. That was another hazard of the job. The whole  _ “is this a supernatural thing, or just a weird ass human thing” _ , and the whole walking into a situation with very little idea of how it might end. Could be fine; could be you’d end up in a body bag. The randomness of it all got wearing after a while. 

Dean was aware that they must have been around some dark magic, just because of the way the Mark reacted to it. It wasn’t a happy thing, but currently it felt almost giddy. That was a terrible sign. Dean tried to focus, to pull himself back into his body - not that he was out of it, but it kind of felt like he was - but it was like trying to climb up the slick walls of an old well. He heard a gunshot, but he didn’t know if it was connected to him in any way. The Mark’s feelings - such as they were - seemed like impressions from another room as well, which made no sense, but there it was. And it was feeling decidedly smug. That was almost a default for it, though. Dean wondered what his default tone was. Gruff? Bored? Guarded? Pretending to be calm but secretly gripping a weapon in his jacket pocket? There were so many choices.

And was he kind of hungry? That sensation made him realize he was still connected to his body. He wasn’t sure how, and he couldn’t quite feel himself yet, but he had a stomach. So that was something.

He tried to focus on the sensation, use it to pull him forward, but it didn’t seem to be working. While focusing on this, he missed everything going on outside of him. He heard a man scream, but it wasn’t Sam, so he wasn’t fussed about it. Smug was still radiating from the Mark like heat from a furnace. Hey, heat - was he feeling that too? He wasn’t completely sure, but he thought so. 

Dean drifted in this mostly null state for an uncountable time, until pain echoed through him, like he’d been hit by a cannonball. Except, no - it wasn’t him who felt the pain. He caught echoes of it, but it was the Mark who really experienced it. He simply felt ripples of it, like rings on the surface of a pond. What the hell had that been? He didn’t think the Mark could actually be hurt. He felt a brief bit of panic, that quickly morphed into its default: rage. Nothing hurt it and lived. But it had no target.

What the hell had that been?

The Mark gave him no answers, but Dean thought he could feel his body for a moment. Mostly he thought he could feel his hands, his fingers curling into fists, and he made them stop. Now he felt genuine shock from the Mark, which hadn’t expected him back just yet. He thought he heard Sam and Jody talking, but he couldn’t catch what either was saying. They didn’t sound stressed or angry, though. A good sign.

He was vaguely aware the Mark was amusing itself by verbally torturing Sam, but he couldn’t really hear it, and didn’t have it within his control to stop it, not yet. But Dean focused on something small. Could he feel his fingers, his thumb? Focus. If he did this increments, the Mark might not notice until it was too late.

It was in this way that he realized the Mark was starting to lose its grip on him. The Mark’s attention wandered - was it bored? - and suddenly Dean could see out his own eyes again. He was in front of the cop shop, and he could see Baby and Jody, next to her truck. She was talking with one of her officers, a young woman who looked like she’d be carded at an R rated movie. He could hear their conversation, and a great lie came to him, based on what he’d heard earlier. Could he say it? He gave it a shot. He didn’t know if he said it, or the Mark said it, but Jody’s eyes widened, and she looked at him in utter shock. What, was his voice too loud? He didn’t think so.

But it felt like the Mark physically shoved him back, which was impossible, and yet, it still felt like it had happened. And Dean didn’t like it at all. _ Hey, fucker, you’re hitching a ride on me, _ he thought at it. It was kind of like mental screaming, which Dean was great at. Dean had been screaming in his mind for, what, thirty odd years now? One long, unbroken scream. He liked to think he was like a duck, in the sense that all the turmoil and fear and panic was hidden under the water, so he could look unruffled on top. Was it working? He didn’t know. But he knew he was excellent at internally screaming. 

The Mark was pissed. It didn’t want him taking over like that, and he could feel hate like waves of heat. He tried to send it right back, because fuck that goddamn curse. Maybe he was losing his body to it, but he hadn’t lost it yet. 

But the ketamine still must have been active, because he felt like he was starting to drift again. Once more, he concentrated on just trying to feel his fingers, his toes, and he started crawling back towards control. 

Dean became aware of bits and pieces, but sight hadn’t returned to him yet. He was aware of another pulse like feeling, which he took to mean Sam was using the monster summoning sigil again. Was that wise? Well, presumably there was a plan in place. 

There must have been fighting, because the Mark was back to being giddy, and Dean was starting to get impressions again. He could feel blood on his hands, heard himself laughing, started to feel a familiar burn in his upper right arm that told him he’d been stabbing/punching/hacking a lot. The Mark was really enjoying it, but it was slipping. Why else could Dean feel a muscle burning in his arm? The Mark should be making sure that didn’t happen.

Now he was starting to get a better sense of the borders of his body, and holy shit, he was sticky with blood. No wonder the Mark was borderline hysterical. It was slaughtering ... what? Dozens maybe? A shit ton of monsters. By now, he probably looked like Bruce Campbell at the end of Evil Dead. But while killing was the Mark’s happy pills, it made it sloppy. It was having so much fun, it forgot he was still here. The Mark should have asked Dean, because he could have told him that sometimes you feel so good, you lose the plot. 

He could now feel sweat and blood trickling down his spine, and wondered if he’d need to be hosed off before he could get in the car or be seen in public. Was the Mark just wading through guts? He knew it was a bloodthirsty thing that reveled in violence, but there was a point at which it became super gross. 

  
Suddenly he heard a tense and angry Sam shout, “Dean, wake up and kick its ass!” Oh no - what was it doing? Dean focused on the blood on his skin, the fingers of his hand ...

... the Mark was holding a gun. It didn’t need a gun, so what the fuck did it think it was doing?

Dean opened his fingers, able to do that much, and felt a surge of rage from the Mark. Dean met it with his own rage. _ This is my body, not yours. Fuck off! _

He could hear the Mark in his mind, hissing like a serpent.  _ This is my body too. We are one.  _

__

_ No we’re fucking not, not yet. Right now you’re just a tick whose burrowed in deep enough I can’t remove you _ . 

Y _ ou took me willingly. _

__

_ Because I’m a fucking moron. But I’m not your bitch yet. _

__

_ You will be. We both know you’re slipping. I will win, because I always win.  _

__

It was telling him things he already knew, and it was making him angrier.  _ Not today you don’t.  _

Dean didn’t know how to do this. This wasn’t the type of fighting he was used to. He just imagined his will as a physical object and shoved. He felt himself - his body - fall to its knees, and felt the pain of it, which was a huge improvement. He also felt he was cushioned a bit by something squishy .... holy shit, he was in a mound of bodies, wasn’t he?

His eyesight came back to him all at once, like someone flicking on a light switch. He saw Jody was aiming a gun at him and Sam was creeping closer to him, but he stopped and met his eyes. “Dean?”

It felt like he had something in his eye. He tried to blink it away, and realized it was a blob of blood in his eyelashes. Okay, cool, so he did look like Bruce Campbell at the end of Evil Dead, just covered head to toe in gore. Awesome. Dean looked at the floor, and confirmed, yep, he was in a pile of bodies, most with horribly mangled or missing heads. “Yeah. What the fuck ..?” He then saw the hammer, which was red with blood, and had a flap of skin with a bit of tendon and bone on it still sticking to the head. Jesus. “Did the Mark go Oldboy on these things?”

“Afraid so. Give me the phone.”

“What?”

“The phone.”

Dean was baffled by this, until he realized he was holding something, and it was indeed a phone. Why? It wasn’t his, and he hadn’t known the Mark had anyone to call. Dean gave it to Sam, who snatched it away like it was another weapon. Dean was going to ask, but Sam threw it on the floor and stomped on it until there were no pieces bigger than an aspirin. “I missed something, didn’t I?” Dean asked. 

Jody let out a sigh of relief, and holstered her weapon. “I thought I was gonna hafta shoot you.”

“Well, that’s fairly normal, right?” One of the reasons he liked Jody was she wasn’t at all afraid to call him on his shit. That was totally fair. She wasn’t mean about it. Brusque, sure, but that was simply her personality. Dean stood, and almost fell over, but managed to not plunge back into the stack of corpses. He felt light headed, and the ground wavered, like he was on a boat and the tide had turned. 

_ You are not getting rid of me _ , the Mark said, in the back of his mind.

Sam was suddenly there, hand on his arm. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I think I still may be a little high.” He felt something bang against his thigh, and Dean looked down to see he had a head hanging off of him. “What the fuck ..?”

“I think that was the Mark’s idea of fashion,” Sam said. 

“Ugh.” He grabbed it by its greasy hair, and pulled the zombie head off him, tossing it aside. Were those maggots in its scalp? Good lord. If he wasn’t high as balls, he might have lost his lunch. 

What lunch? Somehow, he was still vaguely hungry, even though he was decked out like a crime scene at a Hannibal Lecter buffet. Man, sometimes he was so weird.

“Okay, I was gonna let it go, but ketamine?” Jody said. “Why the fuck are you doing ketamine?”

Dean shrugged. “It let the Mark out easiest.”

She stared at him like she didn’t believe him, but it was the truth. At least Dean had a counter. “Why the fuck did you guys act afraid of a phone?”

“It had pages of the Bloody Bible on it,” Sam explained. “The Mark wanted it.”

“Why did it ..? Oh. Do I guess it was up to some fuckery?”

Sam nodded. 

“You do realize up to some fuckery explains your entire life, right?” Jody asked.

Dean gave her a sarcastic little smile - yes, he knew - and then looked down at himself, doing an inventory. Throwing these clothes away would not be enough. He would have to burn these, find a blast furnace if at all possible. Was he going to have to get rid of the boots too? He hoped not. He really liked these. “I’m not going to be able to be seen in public, am I?”

“Fuck no,” Jody exclaimed. “You look like you’ve chainsaw murdered an entire extended family. All the way to fifth cousins twice removed.”

“We have some emergency clothes in the trunk,” Sam told her. “I’ll go get them.”

“And towels,” Dean said, attempting to wipe blood off his face with his most clean forearm, which wasn’t very. He thought maybe he took off a layer of blood, but his hair felt wet with it. Oh god, so gross. “Lots of towels.”

He did his best to wipe off another layer, but he’d pretty much hit a wall. He was head to toe bloody. The smell of fresh blood and rotting flesh was nauseating, but again, the ketamine was helping. 

“You’re going to beat it, right?” Jody asked.

He looked up at her, not sure what she was saying. “What?”

“The Mark of Cain.”

_ You’re never beating me, _ the Mark said, in the back of his mind. 

Jody was looking at him with genuine concern, and he found it both touching and sad. Dean wanted to say she shouldn’t give a shit about him, because he was a lost cause. Did anything say that louder than this? He was standing in a pile of mangled bodies he didn’t remember killing. He was wearing half their weight in blood. He was already gone. 

_ See, Dean? You’re not that dumb after all.  _

But he didn’t want to tell her. He didn’t want to tell anyone. Maybe if he refrained from saying it aloud, he could push it off one more day. No, that made no sense, but he was out of hope. Superstition was the only thing left. “I’m gonna try,” he told her.

_ And you will fail, _ the Mark said. 

Dean mentally told it to shut the fuck up. The Mark wasn’t tell him anything he didn’t know. 


	15. Camouflage

By the time Dean got back to the motel, and showered until he was out of hot water - and he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he got off all the blood on him - he got a call from Cas.

Sam had called and left a message, and he was concerned, but Dean told him he had nothing to worry about. He was, as always, glad to hear Cas’s voice, and he felt himself relax just hearing it. The Mark hated Cas; he could feel its grumbling like an ache in his arm every time he talked with him. Dean thought it was simply because he was an angel, but there was more to it than that. Dean’s emotional attachment to Cas seemed to be its issue, but he really had no idea why. It wasn’t enough to keep the Mark completely at bay. 

It turned out Cas had heard of the akephaloi, and also thought they were extinct. But he let him know stabbing it with an angel blade should be sufficient to kill it, which meant Dean hadn’t needed to worry about how to kill one. Figured. He supposed he should make a stupid acronym of it so it was easier to remember. ABC - always be calling Cas. Okay, that was two C’s. Still. 

Sam was of the opinion that the living akephaloi was driven out by the purification spell, since it didn’t show up with the ghouls and zombies, which meant they had to add hunting down that weird ass motherfucker to their list. Right after the lame vampire twins, Bellatrix and Draco. He cringed to even think of those names. Would it kill vampires to go against the grain and name themselves something truly dorky, like Nancy or Arnold? Arnold the vampire sounded utterly harmless. Which reminded him, he really had to show Cas What We Do In The Shadows sometime. That shit was hilarious.

Dean almost got some sleep that night. You’d think the ketamine would have left him tired, but of course it didn’t, so he helped himself to the better part of a bottle of whiskey, and got maybe an hour or two, before dreams of murdering the world woke him up again. Sometimes it seemed like memories that weren’t his, but Cain’s; other times, it felt like the Mark itself was mocking him. Dean had told it a thousand times it wasn’t the first thing to ever torture him, although it might be the last. It never had any response to that. If Dean didn’t know any better, he’d swear the Mark was sulking. 

In the morning, Jody let them know her halfway house running friend, Tia, was willing to take Ramon, they just had to get him to Tacoma. That was easy enough.

He and Sam took Ramon to breakfast, and told him about the house, and he seemed like he really wanted to go. He was tired of living rough, and holy shit, did he and Sam sympathize. Not that they ever did, exactly, but some of the hunter’s cabins their dad took them to were just a stiff breeze away from collapsing, and were little better than lean-tos in the woods. Sometimes you couldn’t get warm, no matter how many blankets you had. Dean had learned to hate certain states for their winters, and he hated both Dakotas for that very reason. Except Bobby used to be here, and now Jody was here. Personal ties were probably the only thing that kept them coming back. They had so little family, where they lived didn’t matter. 

Ramon didn’t have much in the way to pack, and they bought him a bus ticket, slipped him some spending money, and put him on the second bus heading west that afternoon. He was still having a hard time with this “Ghostfacers stuff” being true - oh god, those idiots were going to haunt them forever, weren’t they? - and Dean gave him one of his “business cards”, so he could call them if he ever encountered something genuinely supernatural. At the bus station, he gave them awkward hugs, and thanked them for not wanting anything from him, which made Dean slightly nauseous with rage. People who used and abused kids were the fucking worst, and he didn’t care if they were human, he was tempted to put a bullet in them anyway. It was probably too good for them.

The Mark heated up in agreement. But it was good with killing anyone for any reason, or no reason. Dean did his best to ignore it.

According to the paper, Grady’s death had been declared a suicide, which is what it was. There was no mention of any occult symbols, which made Dean wonder if Jody had locked that down, or if she had successfully dismissed it as graffiti. Either way, good on her. It was a shame the city would never know how much she broke her ass protecting them from more things than crime, but no one became a hunter for praise. 

Sam kept giving him this look from the corner of his eye. He probably thought he wouldn’t notice, but Dean totally did. He imagine that display of assholery and ultraviolence by the Mark had shaken him up, and it was hard to blame him for that. Dean didn’t like to think about the natural end of this - which should be coming very shortly - and he wondered if his epitaph would be  _ Murdered The World While Trying To Save It _ . It’s a shame it would be so apt.

They left town, on the trail of the lame-o vamp twins, and Dean wondered if he’d miss this when the Mark took over completely. He wondered if he’d even be capable of such a thought. 

Hard to think that these might be the good old days for him. But unless they could conjure up a miracle, they probably were. 

 


End file.
